Old Fashioned Fishing

I grew up in a family that loved the outdoors. We camped, we hiked, we went to the beach, the mountains, a local lake… anyplace that we could enjoy the great outdoors.

We spent a lot of our weekends hiking and fishing. There are a lot of things that we did a bit differently back then. To begin with, we didn’t have the latest and greatest in fishing tackle and gear. Our rods were made up of two or three sections and when they weren’t assembled, we held them together with rubber bands, not in handy little plastic protective cases. This also meant that they weren’t necessarily all together when we grabbed them. More than once, it made for a bit of last minute scrambling. Our reels usually required a few minutes of attention to get the tangles out and everything set up. We put weights on our lines using our teeth and tied hooks with clumsy knots.

Why in the world would we pay for something we can get for free? That was the philosophy of my dad and uncle, and meant that me, my brother and cousin were out in the yard at night after having the sprinkler on all evening so that we could get night crawlers. It was a fun job for a kid, and did teach us that we could provide for ourselves… we didn’t always have to pay for things you could put forth effort to acquire.

We drove to trailheads late at night and slept in our cars with nothing more than a blanket and a wadded up coat for a pillow and leaning on each other.
Up at the crack of dawn, we did not eat some fancy nature trail bar thingy or drink a high energy drink. It was coffee from the thermos and maybe an apple or a candy bar… just something to get us going. We’d hike through dew soaked meadows and fight off mosquitoes the old-fashioned way – we’d SWAT ‘em. We’d spend the day fishing and would almost always come home with a mess of fresh mountain-lake fish. Limits were like 8 or 12 per person, so 5 or 6 of us would get quite a haul.

I don’t know – do kids still do these things today? It seemed like all my friends growing up fished, hunted, or did something outdoors most every weekend. It’s something the kids of today need to experience for themselves, and, NO, swinging around a Wii does not an outdoor experience make!

There's a bathroom on the right...

I remember a time when I didn’t know the words to every single song that I ever tried to sing along with. I remember sitting around my parent’s stereo console with some friends and listening to the latest and greatest top 40 hit that one of us might have bought on a 45 that week. I remember as we picked up the needle and played it over and over, straining our ears to try to figure out the few words that we hadn’t been able to quite make out as we had listened to the song on the radio. I remember us kids all arguing about it and deciding that we really weren’t sure – some of us thought one thing, some another – and we’d decide on the most obscure one, somehow thinking that with a weird word or reference that we didn’t understand, the song was even cooler and so were we since we had it.

And – that’s where we left it. Blissfully unaware of our inaccuracy, and none the worse for it.

So – today – is there any song that you don’t know the words to that you haven’t looked up on the internet? Do you jump on the computer and it’s only a matter of seconds before any confusion about what you thought you heard is either confirmed or cleared up? Or – do you try to listen to it over and over… maybe ask your friends what they think the words are?

…just a little bit of innocence that we’ve given up to the information age.

A Different Kind of Drug Problem

I often lament about the difference between kids today and who/what we were as kids growing up.

A friend sent this to me. It says more in a short paragraph than I could say in a month of blogging. If you click on it, it will open up much larger to read with our aging eyes.

And, please don't think I hate all kids today (I have a couple of my own, you know) - or that I throw all kids into this cauldron of "spoiled lazy brats" soup. I do think that in a lot of ways, this generation of parents as a whole, has certainly done our kids a disservice by not drugging them in some of the ways mentioned here.

I'll be the first to admit that raising kids is hard work, takes concentrated effort and challenges our own abilities and level of commitment - even to the things we strongly believe in. But I also know that it's worth the headaches and heartaches. I pray that God helps us all to bethe types of parents that raise kids that will be upstanding and contributing parts of society, kind and caring to others, and giving rather than selfish.