Old Girls, Fish, and Wrestling

Daily writing prompt

What bothers you and why?

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Current events are interrupting my search for a carefree dotage.

One of my grandmothers went fishing every day. She was an extremely round person and very short and always wore a dress with an apron, even in her rowboat, which, I guess, makes sense when you think of the mess that fish can create.

Every morning, she put on a broad-brimmed straw hat, collected up her cane pole, bobbers, and a can of worms dug up in the backyard and headed to the dock in front of her tiny lake cabin. She negotiated herself into her rowboat, I don’t remember how but know it was a feat, propped her cane pole on the bow, and silently rowed out to the middle of the lake. She caught perch and sunfish. She ate them. She must have. No one ever threw fish back in the lake back then.

My other grandmother played canasta. She also watched professional wrestling which, at that time in the fifties and sixties, was so extraordinarily fake than anyone would know the matches weren’t real. Though she was a retired schoolteacher (retired at the age of 26 when she got married), my grandmother would testify right now on a stack of Bibles that Dick the Bruiser won the match fair and square. I loved her for that and for her brooches which were jeweled and plentiful (if cheap) and for the fact that she saved the tiny square of apple crisp from her TV dinners for me to eat because, you know, she had to watch her sugar.

I don’t know if either of my grandmothers was carefree. It wasn’t something folks dwelled on back then. I know they carved out a place that made them feel pretty okay, a status now becoming my goal since I’ve given up on all this carefree malarkey. So, that’s what bothers me – all these impediments to my bliss.