Deep Fried, Spit-Fire Grilled
This afternoon I took Leif (btw–I just corrected my typo of an “a” as the penultimate letter of his name…) to the lake at Prospect Park where a man and woman were feeding the ducks and geese. One particular duck caught my eye as he was the subject of a mighty chase by two large geese who were intent on stealing the large piece of bread he had in his beak. The duck was clearly outmatched and would occasionally have to pull the instant-reverse maneuver (IRM) to escape either being pecked mercilessly from behind, or driving himself under the water with the force of his own frantic paddling. It looked like he couldn’t last much longer when he managed to swallow the large chunk of bread, at which point the geese lost interest and the duck waddled shakily ashore, seriously ruffled. We onlookers laughed in amazement and relief. Then the people feeding the birds packed up, sending the whole fowl party to another bank in hopes of some more of that fluffy white stuff.
At this point a fascinating woman approached our little corner of the lake. She was wearing billowy, Indian-looking garments with a veil over her hair, and braided flip-flop sandals. She carried two plastic bags–one bright blue and one black–and a rudimentary fishing pole with a simple wooden weight near the end of the string and a very small hook at the end. She was, for lack of a better word–and I mean this with all respect–a gypsy.
I met her eye and smiled a greeting, which she purposefully did not return, though she looked directly at me. She set the blue plastic bag down close to Leif’s stroller and walked away from the lake a ways to stash the black one in the midst of some bushes. While various scenarios spun through my mind (including one in which the plastic bags contain something sinister, and one in which she dashes out from behind the bushes with surprising alacrity to steal our stroller), the billowy gypsy lady emerged from the bushes and padded down to a flat rock by the lake, assuming the kind of relaxed squat that somehow only non-Westerners can pull off. While glancing grimly over her left shoulder, she flung the string of her fishing pole nonchalantly into the man-made lake.
I must admit, I was frankly dubious of her abilities to catch anything with this get up. Her pole looked homemade, the string had looped around itself in her haphazard toss, and she certainly wasn’t paying the kind of attention to it that one normally associates with expert fishers. And yet, in the time it took me to unzip Leif’s diaper bag for a toy, I looked back toward the lake and down went the string! With no pulley to crank it in, the woman jerked the pole lightly upward and caught in her hands a small, green-brown fish. She had her back to me so I can’t say for sure, but it looked like she then quickly took the fish off the hook and stored it somewhere in her garments.
I was amazed. Please believe me when I tell you that during the five minutes I watched her, she caught SEVEN fish in this manner. She surely was charmed, or knew something profound that the myriad other fisherpeople I’ve observed at the park don’t. For one thing, those folk catch nary a thing, at least while I’m watching. For another, if they did happen to hook a fish they would throw it back. Aside from the park rules, these specimens are far too small to provide any kind of substantial dinner.
But my gypsy thinketh not. As I watched her not pull, not coax, but flip the fish one by one out of the water, I began to understand her grim demeanor; this was her sustenance, perhaps to be revoked via thick Brooklyn accent by any number of well-groomed, green-clad park patrolmen who might chance upon her task. Hence the surreptitious looks over her shoulder each time she tossed the string, and the quickness with which she hid her catch.
But besides the seriousness of her expedition, I was dumbfounded by the way the fish practically jumped out of the lake into her hands! Maybe the fish knew how much she needed them…or maybe she really did possess some kind of magical gift that drew them to her. From the fishes’ perspective:
Fish 1: The gypsy lady, the gypsy lady!!
Fish 2: Oooh, she’s so beautiful.
Fish 3: I don’t know, boys…I’ve been in this lake a long time and I’ve never seen anyone come back from her.
Fish 1: Yeah, but don’t you just want to hear what she whispers to you when you jump?
Fish 2: Mike went up yesterday and you shoulda seen the look on his face!
Fish 3: I’m just saying.
Fish 1: I don’t care, I’m going. I gotta go… Here goes!!!…
Fish 2: G’bye, Jim! Come back if you can!!
Fish 3: Bye, Jim.
Fish 1: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee………………
Ok, I do get carried away. But these were my thoughts as I packed up our detritus and strolled back home, preparing to microwave my leftover Kashmir Spinach-from-a-box and wishing I had some quick animal protein to add to it. I’m not kidding. I also thought of that poor, ruffled duck, being chased almost to his death by a couple of bully geese for some morsel of over-processed white flour. And how fiercely he swam, his feathers now and then being plucked out behind him. Maybe he had a black plastic bag stashed somewhere in the reeds, vestiges of a little bit of earthly possession that he hoped no one would steal while he went about his business of finding a scrap of food for the day. Or maybe he understood that the geese needed that piece of bread as much as he did and respected them for their chase, though refusing to stall his flight for feelings of camaraderie.
In either case, I feel as though I witnessed today a few layers of survival economics and am humbled by it. The next time a gypsy doesn’t smile at me, I won’t take it personally, but might say a little prayer for her job at hand, and maybe one for the fish as well. There may be several ways to fry a fish, but apparently it only takes a bare pole and a long string to catch them. Oh, and a large dose of gypsy charm.