Not Just Fishing

Above my desk, where I write, I have hung a picture of me and my grandfather on a dock in Martha's Vineyard. I am about six, which would make him about sixty. We are holding hands, looking out at the water. Actually, as I examine the picture more closely I see that he is looking out at the water; I am looking down at the dock. I am wearing one of the Irish knit sweaters made by my other grandmother, the one who is not his wife. I have red ribbons in my braids. My grandfather's hair is white, as are the ribbons of clouds and the sailboats dotting the sea.

I can't say I remember this particular moment, the day this photograph was taken. But it is evocative to me of my childhood summers spent on this island, with this man, and more than that it speaks to me of how much my grandfather loved the ocean. I understand this now, when I think about him looking at and over the boats along the docks, and when I realize how much my mother, too, loves the ocean, and how much I do, and that these loves are all related, connected, linked like scenes in a movie in that they are essentially seamless, one flowing into the next.

My grandfather was born in a port city, in Goteborg, Sweden. He was of the ocean, as much as a person can be. He looked it: white hair for as far back as anyone could remember, the bluest eyes I ever saw, skin that looked as though there was never a winter, not wrinkled, or leathery, but golden. Every summer, when we were on Martha's Vineyard, he would set out in the morning with his fishing rod, his bait box. He would spend the day on the dock, some dock--there were a few he favored--and return home well in time for dinner.

He did this pretty much every day, but I don't remember him ever catching any fish. I remember my sister and I were a little worried about this, or at least I was. I felt a little sorry for him, even. He tried and tried all day and then nothing. We had been taught that when you tried as hard as you could you were often rewarded with results. He never caught fish, had results, or at least that was the way it seemed to me then.

Once in a while he would take one of us with him, but never both of us at the same time. Was this one of his quiet wisdoms, to know how desperate we were to be alone with one of our grown-ups, how precious it felt to spend a day just with him? I don't know. He never would have assessed it that way out loud, and I suppose it's possible it was easier to just have one of us: no fighting, less responsibility, more quiet.

For these fishing days were quiet. They were not about our having special conversations, or conversation at all. We rarely spoke. When I went I would bring either a sketchbook and charcoals or, more usually, a regular book, and I would sit with my legs dangling over the edge of the dock and read while he fished. He did talk, now that I think about it, to the other fishermen. He would ask about technique, or lures or their boats: he loved boats, you could see it in the way he looked at them, hear it in the way he spoke about them. And he loved these fishermen, too, men who maybe reminded him of the men he'd known as a boy, when he'd probably hung out on the docks for hours at a time, day in and day out, throughout the year.

I found a picture some years back of him fishing in Sweden, as a young teenager, before he came here. He is with a cousin, I think, and a dog. He also loved dogs, who loved him back, melted in his presence, proving the whole sixth sense thing with a single gaze of adoration. There are no fish in this picture, or evidence of any having been caught. Maybe there were never any fish.

I did not understand this as a child. The idea of doing something simply for the sake of doing it is still sometimes difficult for me to fully comprehend, accept, embrace. But it interests me--no, seems essential to me--that when I think of my grandfather now, and I think of him often, and I look at this picture of him standing on the dock every single day, he is almost always standing by the ocean, looking out. I remember the mist wetting the bottom half of my legs, and the seaweed encrusted nets piled on the decks of the boats, and licking chocolate off my fingers from the ice cream sandwich he bought me and tasting salt, and the blue sky, and his blue, blue eyes, and his shock of white fine hair and the fishing rod. I remember him fishing. And finally, I realize that it was never about catching fish.