Kathleen

So my dad fished. In the winter he dragged us onto Pelican or Scooty Lake to sit on the ice and wait for something to happen. In the summer we went out to Little Winnie and stood at the end of a rickety wooden dock. Rick and I didn't want to fish in any season, but we wanted to see our dad, so there we were, fidgeting until the mid-morning break, when my dad would take out his Marlboro thermos and pour us each a cup of Hills Brothers Coffee made fresh at five a.m. by our mother, who surely went back to bed as soon as we left. My dad packed a plastic cup and smoked his one cigarette between sips of the hot coffee. Rick and I used jelly jars that hadn't been filled with jam yet that season. We never caught a fish while we were drinking coffee from our thermos. We never cared either.