It's always fishing season. Oh, there may be certain times you can only catch certain fish, but anytime and all the time is fishing season. And we live in a fishing part of the country. Not only flat-out fun, but an important part of the economy.

Walleye, Northern Pike, Perch, Trout. Whatever it might be, whatever part of the area your favorite spot is, it means a lot to the local economy. It means money and it means jobs.

But there's more to fishing than that.

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It's been quite a bunch of years ago now. I was just a kid. A lot of people called my fishing partner Marvin. I called him dad.

Dad loved to fish, and I mean loved it! No, he didn't have a boat and he didn't have the latest gadgets and gizmos. It was pretty much rod and reel, bait (half the fun was finding those night crawlers), and a tackle box filled with this-and-that.

For us it might be Lake Shetek, Lake Sarah, Current Lake or maybe just a stock dam not far away. It didn't matter, not really, 'cause we were fishin', my brother, my dad and me.

A lot of the time it would be Bullheads. OK, don't gag, I know it's not exactly a favorite among most anglers, but when we'd bring home a mess of Bullheads, clean them (OK, dad would clean them) and mom would fry them up? Yessir, that was livin'.

But now, all these many years later and with dad and mom gone for a lot of years, I look back and realize it wasn't about rods and reels, tackle boxes and bullheads. In fact, it really had very little to do with the fishing.

It could just as well have been baseball. Or hunting. Or tennis or a board game. Heck, it might as well have been just a walk down an old dusty gravel road, just being together.

So I guess on a certain level fishing wasn't about fishing at all. At least not the kind of fishing we did, my dad, my brother and me.

All these many decades later I've finally realized it was about...time.

.Time and memories. That's what those fishing trips were all about.

Randy's Minnesota Memories

Randy McDaniel grew up on a small farm near Leota, Minnesota during the classic baby-boomer years of the 1960s and 1970s. These are his stories of growing up in the idyllic world of southwest Minnesota.

 

 

 

 

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