What Michael Copperman’s Fishing Lessons Reveal About Life Will Surprise You
My aunt even at forty was a beauty, petite and dark-haired, easy to laugh but impossible to get to commit (or so I’d heard my mother say). She’d always had a long queue of boyfriends we’d been asked to call Uncle each trip out to Oahu to visit our grandparents; Uncle Bill was the first one to get a name, the first haole, and certainly the first to come visit us out in Oregon. He was from the Midwest originally, tan, lanky, and tall, sporting a neat grey handlebar mustache that he liked to stroke with one hand. He wore denim and plaid and had a self-assurance that I imagined must come inevitably with being white and having money enough to spend freely on toys and treats and these new fishing poles. That he hadn’t otherwise had much to say to my brother and I did nothing to diminish his appeal—I was eager to have my love bought. Like the heroes I watched on television, he smoked and drank, two things my father despised. He was the hero I’d been waiting for my entire life.
