A How We Met Story or I Don't Know What Love Is or the Last Lady I Cleaned Fish For...

 I see cute little questionnaires on the internet you can fill out so people know how you met your significant other. It has places to document who gets the most traffic tickets and which one of you has the most tattoos. I have never filled out one of those. Once we traded big Chey 350 cubic engines for compact Toyotas and Ford Hybrid technology we tied at zero for citations. We've lost count on the tattoos. I do have a story on how we met.

I think we had really made acquaintance earlier but were not quite operating in the same circles. Cathy was married to someone else. I was a single guy working a good blue collar job. It was a job that required weekend and shift work and Cathy mentioned to me that she had noted we were at some of the same parties and on a Saturday night as the party was getting good she would see me, usually playing in a backyard band, load up my gear and leave. She asked about that and someone said, "oh he goes to work." She had never met anyone who would leave a good party. Somehow all those graveyard shifts I worked back then is related to the $28 Social Security raise I recently received but that might be another blog post. 

One day, it was maybe 1984 or 85 I was at a friend's old house out on Press Road in Nacogdoches County, a cosmic place located half way between Lufkin and the flying saucer landing pads Red Eagle built out in the Shawnee bottoms. Cathy comes in with her husband of the time with a string of big bass she had caught out of a pond. I happen to have a photo from that day. She was pretty excited and as they prepared to clean the fish I could tell they were fixing to make a hash of it. They don't call me Catfish Carl for nothing. I can catch fish but that's only half the story. I know how to prepare them also. 

So to advert what I would consider a disaster and a possibly ill cooked meal I volunteered to clean the fish. I filleted the bass as efficiently as I could and then also saved the backbones to be fried up nice and crisp, a technique I had learned from old timers like my parents who enjoyed their meat on the bone. It made a nice mess that would be a good dinner. I did not eat any of that fish but I'm sure it turned out to be a fine meal. 

It was about three yeas later when we encountered each other again. She was divorced, I was still single and we started dating. We married in 1989. This year will mark 32 years I have been cleaning her fish. Last year we caught 532 catfish. We don't catch that many ever year and Cathy does help me clean fish but I think over the years we are talking about a substantial amount of fish skinning invested in this relationship. 

I don't know how you and yours may have met and I surely don't profess to know what love is but the last lady I cleaned fish for wants me to do it again.