This week I’m reading finals and final projects and doing so under deadline. Everything has to be submitted by Friday. I’ll have approximately 130 papers to work through between now and then. But before I get back to that, here’s a bit on the weekend.

We headed north on Saturday evening to see the in-laws and dote on my mother-in-law. My father-in-law made nice steaks on the grill for us Saturday. Sunday we attended her church. They’ve just gotten a new minister. He’d been serving there in an itinerant capacity, but this was apparently his first service in the full time role.

He did a youth service in the middle of things. It’s an old church and there aren’t a lot of kids there, but the minister said, since it was Mother’s Day, he would sing a nursery rhyme that his mother sang to him. And he wanted the kids, and us, to think about it. So he worked slowly through “Hey Diddle Diddle” line by line, leaving time for the youthful reaction to what is going on in this tale.

When he got to the “the cow jumps over the moon” part, a little boy yelled out, “THAT DEFIES PHYSICS!”

We had dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant. They did not have what I ordered, so I ordered something else. But that’s fine. We’ve been going there for years, it is always terrific.

Today, my father-in-law wanted to take us fishing before we headed back home. So we went to this very nice private club, where he has an in. He brought enough waders and rods for all of us. He paired up with his daughter, and his friend, who is a big shot financial guy and a member of this club, got stuck with me.

I say stuck, because there was a great deal of teaching going on. I’ve been fly fishing exactly one time. I’ve cast a fly on exactly two occasions. (The first time being a parking lot, and I’m not sure that counts.)

Anyway, the scenery at this creek is much, much better than that parking lot.

The full cast was a challenge. I figured out how to roll cast with a little coaching. Doing a sidearm cast was the most natural thing in the world. It seems I could put the fly wherever I wanted with that method.

Anyway, I had a very patient teacher, and I needed it.

I caught five or six fish. Each of them off the hook and back in the water, though I did stop for a moment to admire the two rainbow trout I caught.

So now I’ve caught trout. I think, somehow, everyone here thinks I’ve never been fishing before. Never caught fish before. I grew up on boats and on the shores of lakes and ponds. But fly fishing is new to me. And this was fun enough, but just standing out under the trees and listening to the ware would have been a great day, too. I’m pretty sure I remember the day that I didn’t have to actually go fishing to enjoy fishing. I was with my uncle on his boat, on the river he lived his entire life on. It was peaceful. I was probably in junior high or high school. I thought about all of those experiences a lot today. I learned how to catch small pond fish and catfish with my grandfather. I learned a little bit about bass fishing from some family friend, father figure types. I learned about trot lines and how to catch everything else from my uncle.

And they were all good teachers, too. Teaching a person to fish is more than a proverb. It’s a rite of passage, I think. But they didn’t know much about fly fishing, I guess. There’s not as much of that going on in the Deep South. But up here, in New England, toss out a line and you’re liable to snag someone, like Joe, who was helping me today.

You’ve never seen anyone so determined to help someone else catch anything before. It was kind of him to spend a coaching me up. Never put the first line in the water himself, but he was urging me on at every turn.

It’s a well-stocked creek. The biggest challenge, for me, was getting the fly where I wanted it to go. The biggest challenge for him was patience, and finding new ways to tell me to stop breaking my wrist. He was great, though. And it was kind of my father-in-law to make the arrangements and take us, of course.

But, really, I could have stood there listening to the water all day. He loaned me some new waders. State of the art, he said. They were comfortable and kept me dry and not at all cold. He said they cost $900, making them easily the most expensive thing I’ve ever worn.

And that’s how you know I won’t be taking up fly fishing anytime soon.

Now, back to grading.