Here's a February tidbit for your pleasure.
Hope your winter has been as unexceptional as mine was.
"Brillo" Goes Ice Fishing
by Marilyn June Coffey
I grew up in a family where every day was April Fool's—if you could get away with it. The habit clings.
On a day in early February, I look out our front window and notice an odd-shaped, flattened box lying at the end of our drive. "Damn," I think. "Looks something like a fish."
Just then "Brillo," a.k.a. my partner Jack Loscutoff, wanders into the room.
"Jack! Look at this!"
Brillo lumbers to the plastic-covered window and squints. "At what?"
"At the end of the drive. I think it's some kind of fish."
Brillo, so named for his wild Russian hair, moves to a window not yet covered with plastic, and stares. "Let me get my glasses."
Relieved to watch him leave, I double over laughing silently. He returns, his dark-framed glasses dominating his face, and peers again. "Looks like a flounder," he says. "Might have something to do with that ice fishing contest I read about. Let's go see." He dons his winter coat and pulls his black knit cap over both ears.
I can't believe my eyes. He's really nibbling my bait! If only I could place a bet with Dad!
When we reach the end of the drive so Brillo can see that the flounder is a flattened box, he says, "Wonder how it got here. Must have flopped off some fisherman's boat." He toes the box. "It's a flounder, all right. Look how both eyes stare straight up. You could say it's unusual, morphogenetically."
"'You could say.'" I prepare myself for a Brillo lecture, and sure enough he tells me that flounders are born bilaterally symmetrical with eyes on both sides of their heads. Then the fish's body lists to once side and the underside eye migrates toward the other. The side that ends up with both eyes gets to be the top of the fish.
"It's quite a transformation," he says, "from larval to adult. Just think, a flounder is born swimming near the surface of the water, but by the time it's full grown, it lives on the muddy bottom of the sea. A process of metamorphosis."
"Like a butterfly?"
"Only roughly speaking."
"Right. Like flying pigs."
Dust scatters as Brillo stomps on the box, holds it still with one foot, leans over and picks it up. "Spearing flounder's outlawed now. Got to trap a flounder underfoot to catch it. Only a few million left. Poor things are over-fished or killed by pollution. We're lucky this one showed up."
I expect Brillo to fling the dirty box down the street, but he doesn't. Instead, he shakes it off. "These bottom feeders love to grub in mud." Then he tucks it under one arm and turns back toward the house.
"What you going to do with that?"
He grins. "I'm going to cook it for supper, and you, my dear, are going to eat it." He grabs the flesh low down on my back and gives it a jiggle. We both laugh.
Brillo, a bit of an epicurean, broils a mean fish—with lime butter and seasoned salt, plus peanut butter on the side. So his flounder doesn't taste half bad, once I got used to the texture.
from: a JoLt of CoFFeY
An Intermittent Newsletter
by Marilyn June Coffey
"BitterSweet Rebel"
some BitterSweet books
written by Marilyn June Coffey
MAIL-ORDER KID: An Orphan Train Rider's Story www.mail-orderkid.net
MARCELLA: A Novel To be reprinted Fall 2012.
GREAT PLAINS PATCHWORK: A Memoir
MARCELLA and GREAT PLAINS PATCHWORK are out of print
but can sometimes be bought from Amazon or other on-line book dealers.
A CRETAN CYCLE: Fragments unearthed from Knossos is a rare book.
To buy it, search eBay or other on-line book dealers.
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