For the majority of my time on this earth, I have not had a garage...until now. When I was 8 years old, we moved to a house without one and then when I moved out, it was apartments and townhomes with "reserved parking," if I was lucky. I used to marvel at people who didn't use their garage to park their cars. Often stacks of useless junk would be sheltered from the elements and thousands of dollars would sit there rusting out in the driveway. I looked forward to the day when it snowed and I didn't have to come out and brush/shovel the car off. The trade-off is that I now have to clear a lot more square feet of driveway. I thank God for my snowblower!

But this is June! Why am I writing about snow?  I must be insane.

Yet today, our second car sits parked outside with a huge thunderstorm threatening to ping it with hailstones. Why? Yep, you guessed it. Piles of worthless junk sit inside our garage, the fruit of our labor today. As an early Father's Day gift, my wife worked with me cleaning out the garage of piles of worthless junk. It's amazing what accumulates! Unfinished and unstarted projects, homeless tools, auto parts...from cars I have sold...it's a little ridiculous. Some projects were begun out of a sense of urgency, only to be replaced by something more important. There's a lot of those. A few others were begun with a thought, "this would be cool..." and then they were put aside. Still more were "leftovers," usable bits from other projects that never got dealt with. And then there were the ones, toward the top, like my fishing gear.

The fishing gear is very special to me. I have a rod, reel, tackle, and various weights, all for catching coldwater trout. I don't think I've ever fished warm water. In fact, it was only this year I discovered that "crappie" is not pronounced phonetically, much to my embarrassment, and it was my mom that pointed it out to me. Most importantly, though among all the other stuff is my son's fishing rod. It's a closed-face Shakespeare from Wal-Mart or someplace. It's nothing like my fancy titanium spin-fly with its Abu Garcia open-face with multiple spools for different types of line that are designed to be invisible to fish. Yet mine was hardly used the past two fishing trips this last month.

The Shakespeare, with its irregular cast and thick, "can you see me now?" fishing line, was spending most of the time reeling in cast after cast, with a fish on the other end more often than I ever would have expected. I figured I needed to ditch my own attempts to catch one and help him unsnag his line and give him tips and help when he needed it. My son kept on working at it flipping it out there on the river and reeling it in. He loves it. He loves catching them. He loves cleaning them. He loves hurling fish guts. And he really loves eating them when we get home.

A third generation of the Walden men has embraced fishing, something that thrills me to no end. It's something for him and I to do together, or for us to do with his grandpa. Spending time up on that river, even if its just a couple of hours, lets him and I connect in a way we wouldn't otherwise get to. It's a wonderful thing, and it's why my fishing gear is hung up, ready to go for another trip.

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