Gone Fishing

If I don’t post something here every few days, I feel like something is off. But no time now, I’m off fishing in the stream of Jazz and Orff and children’s games and humor and deep seriousness and music, music, music (and dance, dance, dance) with 20 marvelous souls. We’re not just standing in the stream with our waders on waiting for something to bite. We’re swimming with the dolphins and the fish and catching some with our bare hands and throwing them back and catching others and cleaning them and cooking them and eating them. (Well, those who know me know I’m stretching the metaphor because I actually don’t like to eat fish, but bear with me anyway.) Sometimes we’re in the Class IV rapids slamming against the rocks of our challenges, sometimes whirling off to the side in the eddies, sometimes drifting down a calm stream. It’s exhilarating, exhausting, energizing and takes the full measure of our effort and attention.

It’s a trip I’ve made every summer since 1988 and sometimes during the year as well, a journey I’ve shared with fellow fisher-folks in San Francisco, St. Paul, Sao Paolo and Salzburg, in Bangkok, Barcelona and Buenos Aires, in Madrid, Melbourne and Montreal, in Rio de Janeiro, Reyjkavic and Rome, in Taipei, Tenerife and Toronto and yet more cities. Wherever I go, the water is refreshing, the fish are plentiful, the meal is delicious. While others go to work to do serious and important things, I get to earn my keep sipping lemonade with crunchy ice, eating one potato-two potato and more, stealing cookies from the cookie jar and prancing up and down the piano like a kitten on the keys.

So don’t bother to call me with your official surveys and such. I’m gone fishing.