Not Mine, Yours

From age five until the time that I nearly had completed elementary school,I lived on a magnanimous house, at least to my childish mind it seemed that way. In the backyard of this house, down a slight hill and through a intricate maneuver around vast amounts of canadian geese excrement that dotted the grass like green brown sprinkles was a lake that was surrounded by both properties in my neighborhood, but also properties from the neighborhood from across the lake.

On a particularly sunny day, my friend Kyle, a generally shy kid that lived three houses down from me, and I were outside in the attempts to catch fish in my backyard as we perched like falcons on the rocks that were placed just a few feet in the lake. To us, these rocks seemed like the perfect place to await the fish we so desperately wished to catch, as the rocks allowed us to be above the water while still being close enough to shore so that we could jump back and forth between land and the rocks with ease.

As we repeatedly cast out our rods with the impatience of any child at that age, we remained weary of the trees above that both provided us solace from the heat of the sun and also kept us from launching our lines with particular recklessness as when we did we embedded the hooks in the leaves above. Little did we know that this very day would be more recognizable in our later memories. I, being the one who had lived on a lake for a few years at this point, had caught fish before, so the task of catching fish was a much more mundane task to me.

As Kyle stood in front of me on one of the rocks and I laid on the grass behind him, well within the umbrage of the trees, we patiently waited for a fish to bite. What seemed like an eternity passed by as we waited for fish to come and take a bite of our bait, which always seemed to be either worms we dug up or stale bread that we had taken from one of our houses. Kyle soon grew bored of standing on rock with fishing pole in hand. When he turned to me to ask if we could just cal it quits and go back to his house to hang out in his basement, there was a light tug on his line and the bobber on his line dipped under the water. Fortunately for him, I noticed this and shouted out to him. “Kyle, Kyle! You have a fish on our line! Careful! Reel it in!”

As he went about the task of reeling it in, I had jumped up onto the rock next to him and stood waiting in impatient excitement. The moment the fish was pulled up above the water, I took off running up the hill and back to y house in hopes to find my father to take a picture of this momentous occasion. Within minutes, my father was beside me by the lake, taking a picture of Kyle and his fish. This fish was not anything special, not even the largest fish that ever caught on the lake, but it was his fish, his accomplishment, and that was all that mattered to him. He had caught his first fish.