for my 7th birthday, i asked my parents for a fishing rod. god knows where i had gotten the idea from, but i remember quite clearly how what i wanted to do the most was to fish. my parents had already given up on the fact that i'd be content with staying inside playing with dolls, so they obliged. i think they were secretly hoping i'd toss the hook from one side of my bedroom to the other fishing using papers clips to retrieve crayons and pencils. alas, i had greater aspirations in mind.

i was absolutely ecstatic when i opened my present to find a plastic fisherprice fishing rod with its own little red box where i could keep my bait and the fish i dreamt of catching. granted, the box was barely bigger than a large pencil case, which somehow betrayed my parents' intentions.

i knew that i would only get my way through dad. i mean, it was pretty easy to tell because my mother is scared of anything that looks like a snake, worms included. i remember her shrieking when we'd watch nature documentaries and weird bugs crawled accross our television screen. so i used all the persuasion skills a 7 year old can muster up, i convinced him to take me fishing during one of our weekly outings to the hardware store.

i'm not sure how exactly this happened, but i think a friend of my dad's told him you needed a fishing licence in order to be allowed to fish in quebec. now, this totally makes sense on a large-scale, because it'd be harzardous to let everyone fish as they please. but, really, all i had was a clunky fisher price fishing rod. completly plastic. regardless, my father who is one to abide by the rules, had me fill out a fishing license form at our local canadian tire. i must have been one of the youngest license holder in the whole province. i remember that it came in a little plastic pouch so that it wouldn't get wet. i immediately secured it in my box.

before our big weekend, my father took me yet another time to the hardware store, this time to get the proper hooks for my rod. my father proudly announced to the middle-aged sales clerk that he was taking me fishing and that we needed proper hooks. of course, neither my dad and i knew anything about fishing, so we were a bit puzzled by all the questions: 'what kind of fish do you plan to catch?' (i mean, really, i was not at all sure we would know even after we caught it) 'what kind of bait were we going to use?' (you mean i have to tie something to the end of the hook? that's not how tom and jerry do it!) so, in our confusion we got a hook that was actually made of three hooks glued together. it was golden with a pink feather on it. (that's where my femme-side came out i guess!)

we made it to this creek, not far from the country house we had up north. the stream of water was barely wider than my bunk bed… regardless i was fishing. the three-hook-thingy was definitely scaring the small fish away. i mean, hello? a pink feather, what was i thinking? after a few tosses, it got stuck to the bottom and we could no longer retrieve the line. my dad cut the string and tied a normal hook at the end of it, absolutely saving the day.

i can't quite remember how it is that i caught a fish. i know i was the one who caught it simply because we had only brought the fisherprice rod. lets just say mom was not waiting for us to bring back dinner. i caught this tiny little fish. it was greyish, very non-descript, but i absolutely adored it. somehow, despite having a hook caught - and promptly dislodged - from its mouth it was doing really well. we brought it home and i put it in this flat yellow bucket we had. we had dinner outside on the patio and i kept the fish next to the table so i could watch it from where i was sitting. i was still wearing my fisherwoman's boots (or just your average simple galoshes) and decided to take them off, dropping them next to me on the wooden patio. i heard 'thump' as my boots fell down and the fish that was swiming peacefully until then went flying in the air and fell between two wooden planks. right in the crack. i was hysterical. i ran to get my dad who brought a flashlight and tried to crawl underneath our patio to retrieve the poor thing. i was getting late and the sun had come down. we could hardly see a thing. my father looked long enough to make me feel like we had done all we could to save the fish, though he knew that things were pretty hopeless from the start.

after that, i became quite content with tossing a simple string with a paperclip attached to the end of it from the edge of my bed. when they sent me a letter to renew my license several months later, i simply did not answer.