Talkin' Shit About A Pretty Sunset

Last night I had a dream about fishing. I woke up and immediately recalled something that happened to me when I was about 10 years old. I woke my wife up to tell her about it.

This is the story I told her (the story below is not the aforementioned dream I had last night. Telling someone about your dreams is boring).

When I was 10 my granddad and I were obsessed with fishing. He'd always take me to this one lake were we'd catch tons of catfish and bluegill. On occasion we'd hook a turtle. This one time we hooked a massive snapping turtle. I remember it being almost as big as me, but of course, to a 10-year-old everything seems bigger than it really is. With 20/20 vision in hindsight I realisticly think that we'd hooked a very large snapping turtle.

Anyway, we caught this behemoth snapping turtle and for some reason I wanted to take it home with us. Not to eat or anything but just to have and look at, I guess. For some reason my grand dad agreed so he hauled it into the boat and twisted the hook out of its mouth with a pair of needle-nosed plyers. Here were are, a 10-year-old and his granddad in the middle of a lake in a row-boat with a dangerous beast scrambling around trying to attack us.

All I remember about the boat ride to shore was that my grand dad (aka "Daddo") was literally fending the snapping turtle off with a stick while he rowed with one hand to shore. I can't remember how long the boat trip was but the whole time this turtle was in the stern of the boat fighting and trying to bite the shit out of my grand dad while he fought it off like it was a rabid dog. All this, just so his grand kid wanted to take the turtle home.

We got it home and put it in a trash can so I could look at it for a while. After a time we drove it down to the nearest duck pond and let it go.

That, among other reasons is why my grand dad was my first hero.