Morning Sounds and Memories

Lyn and I woke up this morning at about 5:05 listening to the sounds of bird songs and the wind in the oak leaves coming through our screened bedroom window.  The sounds shook loose some memories locked in my brain for 50-some years.   I rolled over on my side and  told Lyn the story of my dad waking me up to almost exactly those sounds when I was sleepy-eyed kid laying beneath a screened window on a June morning in White Bear Lake.  "Ronnie, let's go bass fishing" were the magic words he used.   It was such an identical memory experience brought on by those ancient sounds this morning that I could remember with precision details of the event including details of his homemade wooden boat and pancakes at the Malt Shoppe uptown before launching the boat at my Uncle Con's dock (caretaker of Manitou Island, then and before they had a public landing of any sort near the bridge to the island).  I was able to tell Lyn where we fished, the hazards of bait casting reels with heavy nylon line and the joys of backlashes and having bass hit my casted "hoola popper" while in the middle of untangling the bird nest of line in my old Pfleuger bait casting reel.  We talked about the Johnson closed faced spinning reel I ordered off of a Cheerios box for $2 and how my father's generation was slow to adapt to mono filament line (thus the Johnson reel company advertised their new product on kids cereal boxes knowing it was the next generation they needed to sell to).  All in all it was an amazing morning hour we spent in laughter and amazement of how sounds can trigger video quality recall of a time well spent and self made father who lived with his hands as so few do anymore.  My father was about 30 when he built wood boat because we couldn't afford to buy one of those new "fange-dangled" aluminum ones.  It was a reminder to me of why I've always wanted to build a wood boat.  I had forgotten except in my minds eye that I had helped him sand and imagine that boat into being in our one car garage that winter of 1954.  Did I ever tell you about the time I caught a silver salmon fishing from the shore of Cook Inlet near the Homer, Alaska Spit using a Fred Arbogast hoola popper?   Guess not, but I know I told my dad and thanked him for the fishing tip too.