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In a story, the moral comes at the end. In an essay, the thesis is stated at the beginning.
Being creative with rules like these fosters art. Or confusion.
This is how it was for me: When I finally got my driver’s license, I was able to use my mother’s car. That was an Oldsmobile Omega, a brownish maroon, frontwheel drive, sort of a fancy K-Car (Iacocca’s comeback Chrysler).
Before that my mother had a silver Monte Carlo. Back then it seemed like just another family car. But when I was old enough to borrow the Olds, I realized how much I missed the slick Monte Carlo.
Way before that, when I was smaller than a child, she had a green Mustang. What I remember about the Mustang was the shade of green, and the songs we listened to in the Mustang. We listened to Diana Ross’ “Mahogany” and got sad and quiet, and then Wings’ “With a Little Luck” and got warm but felt detached because it wasn’t for us. Maybe that was i a Nova. She had a couple other cars.
Finally, I had my license and my mother’s car, so in the fall after school I could go trapping, which in my best year – 30 or so muskrats plus a couple red fox – earned me a few hundred bucks; or go duck hunting; or even camp out – with permission – for a night in warmer weather. Sometimes I camped out in cooler weather, and to stay warm I curled myself in the fetal position around the fire and fed the campfire all night.
In the winter then I could go ice fishing. I needed the car because my schoolmates – Dave (a roly-poly German that was full of life) and John (a big Polish left tackle) – many times wouldn’t tell me when they were going. Luckily sometimes I could guess where they were going because I had helped put out Dave’s permanent icehouse at a popular spot on a big-sized lake called Bald Eagle a half-hour away. That was in another high school territory.
I could drive out to Bald Eagle and park at the parking lot (which was the summer lot) and although the trucks and some cars were able to drive on the nice ice road out to the ice-shelter village, I had to park the Olds and shuffle west into the January wind in my Sorels, with my 5-gallon bucket that had the jiggle sticks that I loved made of dowels and ice scoop and small green tacklebox that I hated. The tacklebox fit inside the 5-gallon bucket if you turned it on its side – and then everything fit nicely – but it was a crappy tacklebox and any time you turned it like that it spilled all over inside itself, so I’d open it to a mess of bobbers and jigs and teardrops and treble hooks and whatever else. It was three-quarters of a mile from where I parked the car around the big cattail point and across open ice to the far island around which were the ice houses, and geez, the worst of it was when you came around that cattail point and the flat, white tear-y wind came right into your face.
One year by some incredible luck Dave found panfish trapped in these small, flooded ponds inside a large, wooded county park. In fact, I think it was called Sunfish Lake Park, in a different high school territory. I think we parked at the park entrance and walked up cross-country ski trails, and there were a series of new ponds flooding the timber down below us, and we went down the slope in the deep, wet snow, crystallized because it was an unseasonably warm, sunny day late in the season.
We caught 10 or so big, big down-South-size crappies that must’ve gotten into the back water and been able to fatten up, and no one else was in on them. There weren’t many, and no hole produced more than one, but we hand-drilled all afternoon in that pond so it looked like Swiss cheese at the end of the day.
A week later they two went back to the county park and got into a lot of sunnies, but they didn’t invite me along. I heard about it, of course, at school, and I heard they were going back the next morning in the dark. So, I tried to sneak along.
I got up early and drove out to the park, and sure enough, Dave’s Blazer was parked there at the entrance. So, I got my gear in the dark and went up the cross-country ski trails. Oh, the woods were black on either side and the stars were just fading above and the snow on the trails was a glowing blue. Overlooking the ponds, I couldn’t see any lantern lights or hear anyone, but I stumbled down the slope out onto the frozen pond, then walked through the frozen flooded timber to another pond.
Finally, through the boxelders over a slip of land I saw a lantern and I went out that way and came onto a hidden bay of a smaller-size lake, and I went out to the lantern light.
And gee, they were so surprised to see me. And not in a really good way. At least, Dave wasn’t. John was, although he treated me like a runt sometimes, which I often might’ve been. I think we only caught a couple of small sunnies that morning. That actually turned out to be Sunfish Lake itself.
It isn’t the moral because it doesn’t follow, and it’s not the thesis since I haven’t demonstrated.
But still, half a lifetime on, I still feel that I am not the protagonist of my own life.
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