Fishing is the act of casting hope, and tackle, upon unclear waters.  Sometimes you extract a winner, sometimes a used tire or bundle of weeds wrapped around an old shoe.  The end result may be a taxidermied trophy for your wall or a pile of wet trash.  It varies.

Fishing requires basic training.  It often comes with the cost of a license or permit.  There are contests and a boat load of experts, some complete with television shows.  Most who partake, however, are weekend amateurs in it for the sheer enjoyment.

Fishing comes in a diversity of forms.  It results in great expectations, tall tales and frequent lulls.  Generally it requires great patience.

Fishing is a lot like life.

~~~

Guppy

I was raised a fishergirl.  My dad took my big sister and me to the grounds of IBM to cast our cane poles into a small pond that seemed in those days more like an ocean.

It was grand.  The pond’s steep bank was scary for a kid of four or five.  While there was no lifeguard, there were round rope-bound floats every 50 yards or so that boasted in bold red letters: LIFE SAVER.  Sitting by the water’s edge I often imagined tossing a float to a struggling swimmer, a fellow fishergirl who ventured too close.  I was a closet life saver.  I also wondered at times…if I were the struggling swimmergirl, who might toss a bright white float to save me?

Around third grade, Dad and I matriculated from the IBM pond to nearby Kerr Lake.  My family purchased a 19-ft Corsair travel trailer and parked it each summer at a private campground discovered by my Uncle Mike.  Eventually we moved up to the 26-ft Coachman deluxe, with a bunk house.

Saturdays I wandered solo to the boat ramp where lucky girls’ parents launched their boats into the brown water.  My ultra-sophisticated gear was always the same: cane pole, bag of white bread (bait for brim and sunfish), Ivory soap (bait for catfish…it can be seen in the darkest of water and doesn’t come off the hook) and an artist’s pad and pencils for sketching nature.  Resupply of all items was done weekly at a once-whitewashed country store 12 miles away.  The sign above the creeky screen door at Buchanan’s read, “If we ain’t got it, you don’t need it.”  I made it a personal standard to buy only what Buchanan sold.

~~~

Angel fish

The inspiration for my fishergirl ways was my godmother and favorite aunt, Mozelle Harward.  Mozelle was my second-favorite relative, falling in line just behind my all-time favorite soul, my maternal grandmother.

To know Mozelle was to know love and life and all good.  She had faith, grace and a sense of humor to challenge any soul.  She chain smoked inside and never once cleaned her house in any meaningful way.  Mozelle was a child’s hero.

My bond with her was due to the seriousness with which she took her godmother duties.  Just-because cards arrived with regularity in our mail box.  Each note closed with the same line: I LOVE YOU!  The words were always underlined, at least twice.   She offered much needed positive reinforcement.

She and my grandmother are the reason I developed a sensitivity to people’s needs.  Mozelle was a) nearly deaf; b) poor and eventually homeless; c) gracious, vivacious and warmly generous in spite of it all.  She attended my induction ceremony for the National Junior Honor Society in 1982, though she couldn’t hear a word.  Smiling, she nodded as though she understood our short, fat principal, Mr. Guess, drone on in the overcrowded library.  At the close of the ceremony she gave me a necklace – a gold-colored chain with a cross covered in tiny diamonds.  Although it came from a dime store, I cried because I knew she could not afford the gift.

~~~

Fish tales: it was <<<…T-H-I-S…>>> big

Mozelle and her husband, Donald, were the first in my mother’s family to own a ‘real’ house.  Their love nest was located next to their small, thriving business in East Durham.  A team to the end, they named the shop for their eternal partnership, Mo-Do.  I swear it was the Taj Mahal of bait shops – no fooling.

Donald, “Uncle Bunny,” made original lures they sold at Mo-Do.  Fishing tackle and outdoor supplies lined the walls in neat, colorful rows.  It was one of the few places black and white people co-mingled with ease in those days.  Working people stood in line for a pack of crackers, a Co-cola and a box of crickets or a bag of minnows.  Cartons of night crawlers were stacked high behind the counter.  People gathered to talk about the weather, religion and Durham politics.  Mo-Do was special.

During prized trips to town I sat in the back of the shop, my short legs swinging from a woven folding chair, listening to the sounds of opportunity ringing at the cash register, all the while daydreaming about fishing.

~~~

Murky waters

In the 1970s a cloud of confusion fell upon Mo-Do.  They say confusion is the devil, and Mo-Do proves it out.

My cousins, Chuck and Tony, began to stray.  They grew up in the shadow of East Durham’s new public housing community, and they were in trouble at times.  Chuck had the hardest journey and was addicted to drugs before his 20s.  He dropped out of school and moved into a single-wide trailer a few miles away with friends.  Mozelle adored her older son and sent young Tony to live with and care for his big brother.  By Tony’s own admission, he saw things a child should never see.  It never occurred to my aunt the saving of one son might result in harm to the other.

Mozelle’s own parents had been distant.  Her father worked out of state and died when she was 16.  The family had always been hard working – proud yet very poor.  Papa Blalock’s death brought an era of desperation to their home in a tobacco-farming community people called The Lost Corner.  Her mother, my beloved grandmother, was overwhelmed and overworked.  Her once easy, gracious smile firmed up, along with her spirit.  Things were hard for a long time.

By the time Mozelle and Bunny married and welcomed their sons, an insistent and loving Mozelle had determined her boys would never face hardship.  She also extended generosity and grace to her eight siblings and their mother, hosting them in her home and using their fledgling store income to keep the extended family afloat.

As the Harward income grew, so did the Harward spirits.  The boys rode the coat tails of the family success and reveled in the gracious leniency of their mother.

Over time Chuck became violent.  He stole money from the shop and quit working altogether.  Things became so uncertain that his parents would not leave Mo-Do without rescuing the day’s earnings from the cash drawer, tucking the dog-eared bundle of bills in their rattling station wagon for the journey across town.  Their attendance at my grandmother’s holiday gatherings became less reliable.

A silent shadow overcame the place.   While it remained mostly unsaid, suggestions of physical threats by Chuck peppered the family folklore.  They needed help, but no one would get near it.  If nothing else, Mozelle herself kept people at bay through her smiling insistence that things were just great – yes, just fine.  Most of all, her sons loved her (double underline).  Together they lived a fairy-tale existence in their warm and happy bait shop on Cheek Road.

The house fell into disrepair.  Mozelle’s house-keeping skills were never stellar, but things grew increasingly out of hand.  As Mozelle and Bunny strained through dime-store reading glasses to make tackle in their side-by-side vinyl easy chairs at night, the peeling paint and leaking roof grew worse.  So focused on work, they hardly noticed the indoor plumbing was failing.  Like the reflection of sun upon the water, a deep darkness existed just beneath the surface.

~~~

Stinking rotten fish

It wasn’t long before a school of piranha arrived at Mo-Do.  The vicious man-eating creatures included addiction, denial and Chuck’s eventual death from a drug overdose.  During this time the State of North Carolina launched a new highway project that would widen Cheek Road, bringing more customers to the store.  Instead, the new highway raised the road elevation by more than ten feet, literally drowning the house and the store in run-off water.  Further, the store’s fading wooden sign could barely be seen from the new road.  The once-bright glory of Mo-Do dimmed.

Uncle Bunny fought with the State and struggled to find a lawyer to represent them for the meager fee they were able to pay.  There were promises of financial settlements and always delays.  Sometime amid the Great Battle of Cheek Road, Uncle Bunny failed to wake at 5 a.m. for the first time in their married lives.  A stroke was diagnosed and treated at the local Veteran’s Administration Medical Center.  Bunny struggled for a few months before giving in to his first night of real rest in nearly fifty years.  For the first time in her life Mo was without Do.

Bunny’s death was not the only strike for the family.  The road project plowed forward, and their home was eventually condemned by the State and torn down.  With half the family gone, Mozelle and Tony moved into a lean-to apartment in the back of their shop next door, and Tony took over his father’s business.

~~~

The one that got away

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.  If Chuck’s addiction and related behaviors were menacing sharks, Tony was a humble goldfish seeking to stay small and hidden near the shore.  He all but disappeared, rising to the surface when needed to support his parents at the store and to please Mozelle.  Otherwise, he was absent and lacked his own voice and direction.  Some said he was lazy.  I saw my older cousin as a nice enough kid living amid confusion.

The responsibility to carry the family was too much for Tony.  With Bunny gone they no longer made lures under their own brand and scaled operations down to the basics: live bait, tackle and related supplies.  The store became a literal dumping ground of used boxes, trash and rodents.

Mozelle grew sick and increasingly isolated.  She called her sisters primarily to ask for money – to keep the power on, to reconnect the water, the telephone.  She stopped leaving her room and was left to use a porta-potty kept in her closet rather than a toilet with running water.

Unpaid suppliers abandoned the business, and the customer base shrank to a loyal few.

~~~

Closet life saver revisited

Through the years my budding inner rescuer responded to numerous two-alarm crises at Mo-Do.  Many times I cried myself to sleep for fear Mozelle and Bunny were in need or because Saint Mozelle had not appeared at yet another family reunion.  When she was present, she did a poor job of faking her spiritual fatigue and sadness at her increasing deafness.  Mozelle was losing a direct line to her extended family, and the world.  All the while she smiled and enthusiastically nodded in agreement to conversations she could not hear.  And she insisted her absent sons were doing well.  “They love me so much.”  (double underline)

There were surgeries and illnesses.  When Mozelle found herself at Duke for hospital stays, I dutifully responded to spend the night.  Once she asked me to keep watch as she smoked.  I was busted in the act of aiding and abetting bathroom smoking and was summarily slapped on the wrist by the night charge nurse.  Mozelle laughed.  “Those people,” she said, easing the sting of our lecture.  An hour later she was at it again, a wry smile on her face as she sneaked back into her z-shaped hospital bed.  “Thank you, Honey.  Mitzi, (long, meaningful pause) I love you so much.”  (double underline)

Once my Aunt Clara and I volunteered to clean the Harward home while Mozelle was at Duke for surgery – this time for a cochlear implant that might restore her hearing.  The home environment had to be sterile for her return.  There was much work to be done.  Neither Clara nor I will ever forget opening the broken-down refrigerator on the breezeway to find maggots teaming among left-over food cartons.

With this experience under my belt, I was primed and ready for the rescuer experience of a lifetime.

~~~

The big one

One Thanksgiving I received a partnership request from a distant relative for life-saver duty at Mo-Do.  He, Bob, was a charming athlete with chiseled features.  For all my humility and grassroots ways, Bob brimmed with confidence and business acumen.  We were an unlikely team.

Bob had recently visited Mo-Do, where by this time Mozelle and Tony lived with Tony’s teenage son.  In the more than twenty years Bob and his wife had been married, he had not yet met Aunt Mozelle.  Their paths had not crossed, and his family had not gone out of the way to introduce him to the poor relatives who lived in the shadow of East Durham’s ghetto district.  He had not known she existed.

Mozelle invited Bob to talk with her privately in her bedroom.  To call it a room is fudging things –a classic fish tale.  Amid a living space that was unsanitary and chaotic, Cousin Bob listened intently to an eager elder spin childhood tales, laugh and invite future conversation.  She came alive in his company and begged him to return.  Not surprisingly, she ended the talk with a manipulative and insistent proclamation that Tony was taking care of the business and family, that he loved her very much.  (double underline)

Bob’s call to me was quite unexpected.  This is the run-down:

• Bob ran a nearby non-profit agency that helped families in need.
• They did not typically do home construction.
• With my help and building connections, he would take on a rebuild of Mo-Do, restoring both the shop and its dilapidated living space.
• Bob made it very clear he was taking on this “project” only to be of assistance to an elderly, desperate woman; he had no respect for Tony for keeping his mother in such foul conditions: No man leaves his mother to live like this.

Needless to say, I was in, my white rope-bound float ready.

~~~

Eddy of confusion

Our first meeting in the shop was puzzling at best.  Awkward silences filled the room between these men – one boldly confident yet charitable and the other so self-conscious he was barely audible.

Bob laid out the terms of the “partnership” clearly:

• He and his nonprofit would gut the store and build it back within its original footprint.
• Because  this would entail teaching one to fish rather than handing out food-line fishes, Tony would accept a revision of his business plan; he could continue the family tradition in bait and tackle but would expand the shop to include neighborhood-appropriate retail, perhaps a thrift store.
• All this *and more!* was offered out of Christian generosity; Bob’s mission to train young men in charity would mean involving his friends and their sons as benefactors; the work would be done by volunteers, and money would come from big-city business connections.
• Bob’s business and church friends would rally around the family to provide any and all necessary services, including dental and medical care.
• Without reservation, all this was being done for the benefit of “that woman in there…I have to be honest buddy, no man leaves his mother to live like this…”
• Finally, the rebuild of Mo-Do and its lean-to apartment would require title transfer of the property from Tony to Bob; in exchange Tony and his son would be given lifetime rights to the place.

With that, Mo-Do’s first-ever outside audit began.

What are your average weekly sales?

It depends on the season.  We make money in spring and fall but not summer and winter.

How many employees do you have?

It’s just me.   I have two friends who help with the register – you know, because I’m so busy taking care of Mama.

So they do this for free?  Why?  You expect me to believe they don’t want anything from you?  Wish I had friends like that!

As the new business partners got to know each another, I spent hours catching up with Mozelle.  For the past decade I had avoided her, primarily because I worked in affordable housing.  Her situation was so abhorrent and I felt so helpless to do anything that I stayed away altogether.  I had abandoned the one person who had never forgotten me.

Mozelle held me captive with pleading eyes.  Mitzi, how’s your mother?  Tell me about your father’s death.  Are you happy?  I love you so much.  I always knew you would find a way to help.  Can we have a side-by-side refrigerator?  It’s all I’ve ever wanted.  Sweetheart, (said with smiling eyes) I LOVE YOU.  (double underline)

And because past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, she ended each marathon session with firm insistence Tony was taking good care of her.  Yes, Tony loves me so much.  He’s such a good son.

~~~

Belly up

A whirlpool is defined as ‘a confused tumult and bustle,’ ‘a magnetic or impelling force by which something may be engulfed.’

At every turn the family’s self reports clashed upstream against a current of cold, hard facts:

• Mo-Do brought in at least $500 on a “good day” – a Saturday or Sunday with moderate weather.
• Taking the conservative route, with at least 20 good fishing weekends a year, two days each weekend, Tony should have grossed more than enough to comfortably feed and clothe the family while maintaining the business; Bob’s forecast was much higher, and there was not a penny to be seen.
• The building itself was little more than a rotting dumpster of trash and rats, some living and some dead.
• Mozelle’s bedroom in particular was so structurally unsound you could literally push through the wet plywood from outside and wave at her in her rusted hospital bed; no insulation, no running water, inadequate heat and air.
• She was addicted to prescription pain killers, a fact easy to understand given the desperation in which she lived.
• Generally she was fed Oodles of Noodles for brunch and bits of whatever came into the shop in the evening before falling back into drug-induced slumber.
• This exacerbated her host of medical problems, including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease and a rare autoimmune disease that left open lesions on her body.
• More disturbing facts were found in my cousins’ living quarters.
• Amid the chaos, Tony was often missing in action, either not on site with his ailing mother or in his room sleeping well into the work day while his “friends” ran the business.
• He regularly hit up contacts for large loans that were never repaid – to take care of Mozelle, of course.
• The image forever burned into my brain: baby roaches crawling through Mozelle’s bed sheets, feasting on the open sores that covered her legs and feet; more disturbing was her ability to ignore them, as though it wasn’t happening.

As the evidence clashed with Tony’s wide-eyed, innocent exclamations, the dark waters swirled.  We were pulled farther in to the deep unknown – down, down, down.

With all this, and more, taken into account, I called Bob to tell him I was reporting my cousin for elder neglect.  There would be no “project.”  Mozelle’s best hope was to be taken into the State’s care and placed in a third-rate nursing home that would at least feed her on a regular basis and keep her safe from passing thugs, and infestations of bugs.  I would be blamed by Tony as well as her sisters and perhaps even by Mozelle herself.  But I would sleep well at night.  A rebuilt shop would result only in more questionable activity and greater risk for Mozelle.  The project would not change her outcome, and this gift was about her, after all.

Within days of placing the report, the threatening phone calls began.  There were consequences for uppity people like me who march into poor people’s homes sporting make-up and fancy clothes, looking down on them.

With great sadness I accepted that I would likely never see Mozelle again.  I sat on my back porch overlooking a small pond just a few miles from Mo-Do and mourned the premature death of my favorite aunt and godmother.  To me she had already died.

~~~

A fish tank of regret

I separated myself from my extended family and plowed forward with my job helping Durham families in need of decent shelter.  I pushed Mo-Do to the back of my mind and sight, even changing my commute home to avoid the shop.  Eventually I forgot it, and they, existed.

More than one year later I received the call I had anticipated: Mozelle was dying.  To my own surprise, I met my mother at the hospital and spent two days at her bed side.  For months she had asked earnestly, “Where’s Mitzi?  What did they do to Mitzi?  Is she mad?  Is she okay?  Why isn’t the shop being fixed?”  Finally I was there, and she was too sick to know.

When Mo and Do were finally reunited, Mom and I were present, along with Tony and his friends.  They were predictably uncertain of me, struggling to make eye contact.  I was the first in Mom’s family to choose to extend them grace, an act of love for Mozelle as much as safety for myself.  I did not want them angry at me again.

My mother’s sisters followed suit, and we gave her a going-away service worthy of a minor hero.  Family on both sides gave to cover expenses.  Tony showed up late to his mother’s funeral with friends in tow so as not to face us alone.  Afterward we shared a family meal and struggled to impart happy memories, all the while suppressing our real feelings of resentment and regret.

As we walked to our cars after the meal, Tony approached Mom and me.  “Thank you for everything you did for us.  (long pause and sad brown eyes)  I know you did it for her and not us.”

We stared back with nothing to say.  He had told the simple truth.

~~~

Reflecting pool

Having had some time to sit on shore and reflect on the rise and fall of Mo-Do and the life of my endearing aunt, the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ring true.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Following is the closest I can get to an objective perspective on the cats (or catfish) involved in this tale.  These descriptions are not to let anyone off the hook, nor are they intended as prosecutorial evidence.  My hope is they represent a balanced view of the multifaceted nature of each person.  We are, after all, more complicated than fish.

 

Mozelle

A farm girl turned shop owner, Mozelle was a woman of unlimited heart and playfulness who wished for her children less hardship than she had endured.  She displayed great openness and welcomed people of all races and walks of life at a time when it wasn’t yet socially acceptable.  Hazy boundaries made it difficult to discipline her children.  Before she understood what was happening, they had each slipped away.  Her need to believe and present the best led to faith in a made-up world of happiness, a place where hardship did not exist.  Eventually depression set in, and she became immobile, unable to ask for help or face the truth.  The facts were too overwhelming.  An imaginary world became her reality.  She eventually died of profound neglect.

Tony

This is a quiet and polite kid raised in a less-than-stellar neighborhood, one of two boys who wanted only to please his mother.  Always second in line to his older, more outgoing brother, his default mode was that of helper, to the family business and to the family secret of a sometimes violent and addicted brother.  He dropped out of school and knew no other business than the family’s bait and tackle store.  His male role model, his father, was a quiet man not known for speaking out.  A resulting lack of internal and external resources led the adoption of his mother’s acceptance and immobility in the face of financial stress.  For him, love was defined by leniency, even when it meant allowing danger too close to his dear mother.

The Friends

This one is particularly hard because I have not yet found a place of understanding for them.  I don’t know them or care to know them.  There are two so-called friends who support Tony and his son.  They help run the shop and claim to accept no pay in exchange for their hours of work.  When Tony finds himself without water or electricity due to unpaid bills, they continue to step in, using city contacts to go around the system.  For instance, they regularly have the water turned on at the meter when the city shuts it off.  The two words that come to mind most readily are ‘enablers’ and ‘users.’  Their early-morning assistance at the shop while Tony sleeps in is believed tied to secondary gain – a financial coup to which Tony is almost literally held hostage.  They are running their own agenda through the store.  At the same time they care about Tony and loved Mozelle.  After all, how could one not feel love for such tender and amiable souls?

The Family

This is my mother’s large farm family.  Each overcame a childhood of struggled and want.  As a result, they hold a spirit of independence – from one another and the world in general.  There is not much they need, making them a tough ask for people with great need.  They loved Mozelle and helped in some ways – twenty dollars here, a Christmas gift there.  Helping in a transforming way was almost beyond their understanding.  For years I carried guilt for their perceived lack of compassion.  Only as an adult did I understand there are some systems that can only be changed by those involved.  My mother and her sisters were a few steps ahead of me on this.  They were correct all along.

Fishergirl

Finally there is the closet life saver, raised with great sensitivity to two women who showed her great love: her grandmother and Aunt Mozelle.  From each she learned awareness of need.  All good deeds performed on their behalf earned unconditional embrace.  Even as the truth was revealed through indisputable evidence, she earnestly challenged her benevolent business “partner” to consider things from the Mo-Do point of view.  She had bought the fish tale – hook, line and sinker.  When the truth came crashing down, a lifetime of positive assumptions begged to be reconciled.  She had to accept that some things are not meant to be understood.

~~~

Hooks, lures and nets: a tackle box of deceit

The snares that entangle us imperfect people are universal: they reside within the darker side of the human condition.

Here are some involved in the rise and fall of Mo-Do:

The New Normal

This is a personal favorite.  That stack of mail on my kitchen counter, after all, is rarely noticed these days.  I work around it.  Most of us experience this phenomenon in different ways – whether a literal object (that middle bedroom, closed since the last sheetrock repair – I hardly remember it!), a habit or habit forgotten, even a relationship.  Once something surprising or different, perhaps in need of attention, we now ignore it.  At Mo-Do, clearly this lure was hard at work – in the physical space, the so-called business model and the family’s entire way of living.

Denial

It’s not just a river in Egypt.  It is, in fact, the Queen Mother of lures in this tale.  All of us accepted a degree of denial about the living conditions and economic health of Mozelle’s family.  Really, who wants to know someone so dear is hurting so badly?  Isn’t it easier to simply not know?  So we knew without really knowing, or something like that.  Mozelle pretended her sons were saints, and she came to believe it.  Even when asking for help, she could not accept the notion that they were less than stellar, doting children.  Tony himself loved his mother.  I don’t doubt that for a moment and never have.  His actions, however, don’t prove it out, not according to my way of living.  But Tony inherited his mother’s knack for believing the easy and denying the difficult.

Avoidance

This beast is closely related to denial.  Specifically, denial allows avoidance to happen.  Who doesn’t put off a task that requires effort, perhaps one for which we feel ill prepared, in favor of something fun – like, say, fishing?  I have no rods or cane poles to point on this one.  Offer a preferred task, and I jump right out of the boat of the task at hand.  I can say without reservation that my cousin Tony has avoided responsibility nearly fifty years, and has been allowed to do so.  Yet he is really no different than many of us in this respect, at least from time to time, in varying degrees and for our own reasons.

Pride

Our old friend Hubris is long known.  (He’s been hooking fish for a long time.)  Tony gave in to the notion that he and his mother didn’t need any help.  Bob believed he was a benevolent savior.  I felt I was *just* the person to make it all happen in a way that would bridge the cultural differences between the business “partners.”  I could fix it.  All of this drips with pride.

Perfectionism…Overwhelm…All or Nothing

This triple-pronged hook is not as obvious in the tale of Mo-Do.  Perhaps it applies best to those of us on the relative outside.  I said myself the last ten years have been distant between Mozelle and me.  Here’s the quote:  For the past decade I had avoided her, primarily because I now work in affordable housing.  Her situation was so abhorrent and I felt so helpless to do anything that I stayed away altogether.  If I can’t do everything, I will do nothing.  Makes sense, right?  The same is true of Tony, who could not imagine a solution to the smallest problem, much less the three-headed best the shop became.  Why bother when there’s no way to fix it all?  The base emotion, as with so many things, is fear.  It gets all of us at some point.

Right Fighting

At times we all found ourselves disputing individual facts.  Bob: He hasn’t paid property taxes in seven years.  Me: He inherited the shop and its debt from his father. Round and round we went.  I analyzed every piece of data I could find in an effort to understand the truth.  If I won the first round, I was sure to lose the fourth and sixth.  We failed to realize until very near the end there are simply some things more important that facts.  Sometimes what appears to be happening and what’s really happening are different fish altogether.  In either case, people were suffering.

These are just a few things that populate the tackle box of deceit.  There are others at work in this tale of fishing, and life.

~~~

Reflecting pool revisited

So why does it all matter?  To me there are three layers, three depths, of understanding.

1. The first is the list of obvious fishing lessons, including:
   1. Things are not always as they seem.
   2. Life is gray.  Often there is no black or white.  It gets complicated.
   3. It is impossible to help someone who chooses her own situation.  This was a tough one for me in regard to Mozelle.  When offered assistance, after asking for help, she chose the status quo.  Further, she helped create the situation that trapped her.
   4. Ultimately some things are not meant to be understood, in spite of cold, hard facts.
2. In I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou wrote: People are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere.  The second depth of understanding from Mo-Do comes from the idea of reflection and reflecting pools.  All this thought is the reflection of something – ourselves.  The only way I can come to terms with Mo-Do and find any peace at all with Tony is to understand the ways in which we are alike.  Sure, the behaviors and traps fall along a continuum, and his are pretty extreme, yet they still reside in me, and in you, in unique ways.  By seeking understanding with myself and my own motives, I am better able to understand the experiences of others.  (I’ll tell you a secret here: this article came about because just two days ago I decided to stop judging and resenting my cousin.)

A second note on the provision of empathy: while it is wise and right to be open to our own flaws and our connections to others, it is also true that:

a)      There is a difference between my long-standing trait of perfectionism and the overwhelm that leads to the neglect or abuse of another soul.  A character flaw that slows us down is one thing.  One that results in an elderly woman rotting to death in her own bed is something else altogether.

…which leads me to…

b)      In our quest to understand other people, it is wise to recognize true darkness when we see it.  Sometimes wrong is just wrong.  Some sins are not meant to be overlooked.

3. The ultimate depth of understanding is ironically the most transcendent.  Mo-Do is ultimately a story of grace and mercy.  I extended grace to Tony following Mozelle’s death, but for pragmatic reasons; I didn’t want his clan angry at me again.  I had been afraid long enough.  It’s almost embarrassing to admit I continued to harbor anger and judgment long after smiling at his friends at the funeral and insisting they sit up front, with the family.

The reflective piece is also at work here.  We are, after all, unworthy of the grace and mercy we are offered in life.  They are free gifts, with no strings attached, except that we offer the same graces to our neighbors – as we would have them do unto us.  We are asked to forgive, even when it doesn’t make sense (especially then) simply because we are offered the same absolution, in spite of sometimes being stinking, rotten fish.  Can we really receive such gifts and not reflect that grace in our own interactions?  Well, yes.  I do it all the time.  The challenge for me is to remember there’s a source beyond us mere anglers, and fish.  We are simply asked to try, each and every day.

And don’t forget that our greatest challenge is often to extend ourselves grace and mercy.  Sometimes letting another cat(fish) off the hook is easier than holding the mirror of understanding to our own fish faces and loving the imperfect souls we are.

I was challenged just today by someone who reminded me we aren’t only called to recognize our own flaws – our fish lips and big tails – but also our inner goodness.  Isn’t it interesting how easy it is to see first the negative, in ourselves and others?

~~~

Tackle box of deceit revisited

Before leaving the hooks and lures that entangle us in life, I would like to offer a new perspective.  Sometimes these snares are actually tools.  Perhaps this is really a tool box?  Here’s how I see it: perhaps Mozelle’s fantasy life, read by some as delusion, is the thing that kept her alive.  I mean, how many baby roaches can crawl out of your Co-cola before you need to check out of reality?  I’m serious.  Even Tony’s behaviors are acts of great adaptation.  The guy was raised with few sustainable problem-solving skills, and so often he was in charge, both of the family and the business.  It seems a bit unfair, unbalanced.  He could bend or break, and he found a way to bend.  It might not be the best strategy for the long term.  It certainly hurt other people.  Another Maya Angelou-ism: When we knew better, we did better.  Only he never knew better.  Or maybe now he does since his mother’s death – or will one day.  It isn’t mine to judge.  But the point is our flaws can be seen as ‘bad’ or as adaptations that help us survive, for a while.  Until we know better and can do better.  (This is that grace piece again, turned around on us.)

~~~

Tale’s end

Fishing is the act of casting hope, and tackle, upon unclear waters.

One of the gifts of fishing is that nothing, however good or bad, lasts forever.  A slow day is almost always followed by a big catch.  Conversely, no lucky streak lasts very long.

Another gift is that we are better anglers, better people, with every outing.  Each time we sit upon the shore and cast we are more experienced and wiser than the day before.

Although the waters can be dark, they still teem with gifts, if we look closely or wait patiently.  The outcome is often a matter of perspective.

Fishing can be difficult, but it is ultimately rewarding, even amid occasional poor casts, stolen bait and bad luck.  The good news is that there is grace enough for our mistakes and the ones that get away.  There is always hope for tomorrow.

Fishing is a lot like life.

© Mitzi Viola, 8/19/10