Cleaning out the office

Subject: Cleaning out the office
 
Over the many years of Bridgestone’s Explorer cases and my fling with mass torts, my office had become piled with paper, magazines, notebooks, novels and odd pieces of electronics which, when assembled into my trusty Tumi rolling office, became my life and business support system when I traveled to a mediation or a meeting.  The detritus included fishing notes, maps, books as well as a hearing aid to hear high pitched women’s voices in a large conference rooms, reading glasses, cd’s of regulations and statutes, pens, batteries, recorders, an iPod, ear phones, a ruler and the small magnifying glass that my grandfather left me.

 

As 2011 wound down I made a firm resolution to clean the place out, dust off the furniture and bring some order to evidence which would lead some to believe that I should be the subject of a reality cable show called, Hoarders.  Unusual as it may seem to those who know me well, I have kept my resolution.  My rug is visible and more than 5 fifty gallon garbage bags of paper and trash have gone to the recycling center.  The result is a decent room, some organization of the remaining materials and the jarring confrontation with lots of old memories that lay buried in the flotsam.

Mostly the items, like the recollections mentioned in Wordsworth’s Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, were pieces of what came back from great fishing trips and encounters with friends from all over the country.  Venezuela, New Zealand, Oregon, Montana, Pennsylvania, Idaho, South Dakota, Virginia, North Carolina, Vietnam and on and on.

There are pictures of Fred Bush that I need to scan.  I am awash of recollection.

January, 2012, was the first month in this century that I haven’t traveled for business.  Maybe I am like my dad, an old soldier.

 

Any way, what prompted this outburst was a note from a good friend quoting an entry from a blog called Trout and Gin, which I am sure has significance for us all.

http://flyandgin.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/old-gear/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FlyGin+%28Fly+%26+Gin%29

 

Larry

 

Old Gear.
Posted: 01 Feb 2012 10:20 AM PST

 

I browsed a roadside thrift shop the other day. Its basically a cinderblock four-car garage stacked wall to wall with….junk. Old furniture, books, ornaments, paintings, sporting goods, electronics, you name it. It’s shopping’s version of the treasure hunt, never knowing what you might find. In this case, I found a few old fishing items I thought I’d share.

Amongst some old ski poles, pool sticks and an ancient looking pair of ice skates stood a collection of old fishing rods in various stages of decay and disrepair, some with bobbers and line still attached that clearly hadn’t been cast in decades. I examined them for brand names I may recognize as classic or deceased, just in case I was staring at a collectors item, and concluded there was not much more than junk here. None the less, it makes you wonder who owned them, and what kind of fish they caught, and where. More, it makes me wonder who decided to give away all of their fishing gear, and why. Maybe it wasn’t the original owners choice at all. Maybe they were just clutter in someones garage; remnants of people long gone.


My favorite find were these fishing publications from the 60′s. Sports Afield, complete with hand drawn covers of fisherman in row boats or standing alongshore, a nod to a time before there digital cameras and fisherman covered in sponsorship badges making them look not unlike Nascar drivers, and standing in $40,000 boats and holding $700 rods. The bold tagline on it the cover was optimistic: “The Best Ideas on Fishing Ever Assembled in any Magazine!’ The back cover was for cigarettes, promoting how this particular brand would make you stand out in a social crowd.

Another copy from the 70′s showed an older man in jeans and a button down shirt and the obligatory fishing hat, standing in a beat up old boat and holding a three-foot pike. A sub line promises an extensive article on wilderness trout, of which there had to have been many more of than there are today, and the opportunity to order, from Sports Afield, a kit that would allow fisherman to test for acid rain.

Though absent long, 

Wordsworth

These forms of beauty have not been to me, 

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: 

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din 

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, 

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, 

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, 

And passing even into my purer mind 

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too 

Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, 

As may have had no trivial influence 

On that best portion of a good man's life; Sphere: Related Content