This is about my favorite cousin Charles

 I’m going fishing! My cousin in Alabama has this great place out on a lake Alabama and Mississippi built a few years back by flooding about a zillion farms and forests and it is the most fantastic place for fishing. Because it is also the week of the family reunion, we have made it a traditional fishing week.

Tomorrow I will pack up my little red car with all my fishing gear, pack all my fishing clothes, along with a few other necessities like evening dress and heels etc just in case and set off for Red Bay, Alabama. My cousin will be waiting, since we do this every year and wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s about a six-hour drive so I will pull in his drive in time to change, clean up and go out to dinner in one of the few decent restaurants in town, after which we will sit up and talk all night.

Naturally the next day we sleep late, drink tons of coffee when we get up and inevitably end up revisiting our past, driving around most of the day, remembering the summers we had spent as kids and teens. It is now Thursday and we decide to fish on Friday. That night we spend examining all the new toys he has bought for his pc and talking and eating the better part of the night.

The next day, we realize we haven’t been out to his mother’s house yet and since my mom and aunt are there, we decide we had better make nice today and fish the next day before the family reunion. We agree to get up with the sun and fish for hours before having to dress for the reunion around noon. When people ask us how the fishing has gone, we tell great fishing lies and promise a fish fry on Saturday night with all the fish we have caught. Did I mention that we haven’t even made it out to the fishing camp yet? But we do plan on fishing. We load up his Ram that afternoon and go out to spend the night at the camp, first stopping for tons of supplies and lots of bait at the local service station. Here we always end up meeting some of his friends and inviting them out to the site that night for some music. My cousin is a popular local musician so we know the word will spread and a party is on. Because it will get noisy, we go ahead and invite the people from the other camps to join us. The next morning, drunk/and or hung-over we set out to fish, extremely early since we haven’t slept yet.

My cousin has a very comfortable catamaran so we set out our lines and snooze while waiting for a bite. Needless to say, with so much enthusiasm, we fish all morning with very little luck so arrive at the family reunion with more fish lies. Sure, we say, the fish fry is on for tonight. I’m hoping his freezer is full and he’s hoping for thunderstorms.

Neither of us is that lucky so after the family reunion, we head to the Piggly Wiggly to buy fish and all the things we need for the fish fry, which goes off without a hitch because we are well practiced after years of this routine. We all stay up late again, but this time it is all family so we can relax a little more and think of more great fishing lies. As they have every year before, everyone enjoys the fish fry and looks forward to next year when my cousin and I will fish again and repeat the whole process.



So far the only person to get wise to this whole thing is his wife, who keeps her mouth shut after we remind her of the time she lost her jeans out at the swimming hole when we were kids and we had to sneak her home in her underwear. She is still afraid for her dad to hear this story after all these years, and we are not above blackmail. So I leave Alabama again this year, tired and happy and all fished out until next May.

If you are wondering how I can be sure ahead of time how my week will go, all I can tell you is that we Southerners are big on tradition, we wouldn’t dream of changing a thing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, my cousin would say, and our fishing week is perfect just like it is.