“I Think They Should Call It Waiting”

  Finding old photographs of your grandfathers in their younger days can make you think about how they spent their time back then. About the things they knew. Men from that generation could fix their own cars. They worked on tractors and farming equipment. They were master gardeners because they had to be. They knew how to fish and spent most of their days in the great out-of-doors.    

   Television wasn’t around when they were young. I looked up the history of the television and who in the world came up with such an idea. Turns out a twenty-one-year-old man invented it in 1927.

   RCA introduced television to the American public at the 1939 World’s Fair. Before the fair, dealers were provided with a brochure that explained what a television was. The first color televisions were available in the 1950s.

   My husband is an avid fisherman, and I’ve gone fishing with him a few times. I watch while he fishes. I thought I didn’t know much about the sport until I completed an online word game that happened to be about fish. I answered the questions with 100% accuracy. It made me chuckle. A perfect score. About fish.

   A few years back, my husband took his fishing gear to our grandson’s birthday party held at Mallard Lake. He set up a few fishing poles so the children could participate. The boys sat at the edge of the lake and kept their eyes on the bobber.  

   Our grandson Thomas sat in silence for a while before telling his grandfather, “I don’t think they should call it ‘fishing.’ I think they should call it ‘waiting.’”

   His statement was added to our list of inside jokes.

   My Grandma and Grandpa Imm lived through the Depression years. They were savers. I became aware of their collection of old papers and such after my nephews carried down some boxes from my parents’ garage attic. More greeting cards. More newspaper articles. More things. More stuff.

   My mom inherited these boxes back in the early 1970s when she was the young mother of a growing family. I can just hear her telling one of my brothers to carry the boxes upstairs to be stored in the garage attic. She would have to face them later.

   Now I’m the owner of a box full of my grandparents’ greeting cards that’d been signed by their friends and family.

   I’m sure those who’d sent a card could never have imagined it’d resurface well after the turn of the next century. Fifty years after they’d placed their card in the mail, it would be read by Albert and Lula’s granddaughter.   

   In June of 1967, Grandma Lula received a small get-well card with the words “To Someone Indoors” on the front. I asked myself what that meant.

Interestingly enough, I found this card just a few days after I had written the second paragraph of this story.

On the inside were the words “Here’s a thought and a smile. And a greeting to say Hello and how are you? Hope you’re better today.” It was signed by Edith Sanders.

   I asked my friend Elaine about those three words: “To Someone Indoors.” She said if you weren’t outdoors back then, working in your garden and such, you were ill.

   The card recognizes the fact that you’re recovering indoors, and one of these days you’ll be outside again where healing really happens.  

   We spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen. We wait for meals to be served, mail to arrive, and friends to make up their minds. We wait for grandchildren to visit. We wait for rain showers to stop. We wait for just the right weather when we have a kite to fly outside. We wait for gardens to grow, bobbers to bob, and fish to bite. 

   My Grandpa Imm found out his neighborhood cat knew how to wait for the right moment, and he ended up with a fishing story to tell. In the fall of 1968, after catching three bluegill, he left the fish in a bucket in the garage and went inside the house to rest for a while.

   When he returned to the garage to take care of the fish, he found an empty bucket. The neighbor’s cat had taken off with the fish.

   The story of the little thief trespassing on my grandfather’s property made the news more than once. After it was published in The Edgerton Earth newspaper, a local artist and author, Russ Hilton, included Grandpa’s story in one of his books entitled“Would You Believe It Happened in Williams County?”

   I met Russ years ago and told him that my Grandpa Imm’s fishing story was in one of his books. Russ showed me his workstation where he drew the illustrations for his newspaper column. I remember thinking it would be fun to have a talent such as his – combining art with human interest stories. And when we have to spend time indoors, what better occupation could there be?   

   Russ had drawn a picture of a cat in a pail and written the following paragraph:

Albert Imm went fishing recently and caught three beautiful blue gills, so he says, but forced to quit fishing due to a wind change. He went home with his three fish. He decided to rest a while before he cleaned them, so he put them in a pail in the garage. When he went to clean them they were gone. The culprit was the neighbor’s cat who always knows when Mr. Imm goes fishing. But he has no regrets because the cat is the mother of a number of kittens, but he sure would have liked to have seen her get those fish out of the bucket! 

The Waiting Disclaimer:

   You have only moments to live. One moment after another. One moment you may have fish in your bucket, and the next moment you may not.

   Go ahead and call it “waiting,” but you are simply living life. You may finish a day’s worth of moments and realize you had fun with friends, you had fun with family, and you found joy in the waiting. 

   And no one will appreciate the fact that you value your afternoon naptime more than your neighborhood cat.