Читать книгу Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night - Lewis Grizzard - Страница 27

Knowing Where to Draw the Line on Carp

As far as I know, my late grandfather never read The New York Times. He read the Bible, The Market Bulletin, and a Sears Roebuck catalog, but I just can’t picture him dealing with the likes of R. W. Apple, Jr., William Safire, and Flora Lewis.

I think he would have been astounded if he had ever picked up a Times, as I did the other day, and read a front-page story about how scientists have been fooling around with his most unfavorite fish, the carp.

The Times story, displayed at the bottom left of page one opposite a George Bush campaign yawner, explained how scientists have taken a growth gene out of trout and have implanted it in carp, thus making it possible to grow bigger carp.

“Who in the devil,” my grandfather would have said, peering over the top of the Times, “would want a bigger carp?”

My grandfather was a kind and gentle man, but there were a few things he hated.

Among these were opera singers on The Ed Sullivan Show, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and carp.

“Sorriest fish there’s ever been, the carp,” my grandfather would say. “It’s too hard to clean and too bony to eat.”

On one of our fishing trips to Sibley’s Pond, something grabbed my hook and down went my cork.

I ran backward with my cane pole in order to pull my fish out of the water. But when I landed my catch on the bank, my grandfather took one look at it and growled, “All you got is a carp. Throw it back.”

With that background, then, it should come as no surprise that when I read the Times story I, too, reacted, “Who in the devil would want a bigger carp?”

I talked to several fishing experts to find out. One, Charles Salter, fishing writer of The Journal/Constitution in Atlanta, told me Orientals treat carp as a delicacy.

He even said that during the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson sent fish experts to that country to help natives produce more carp.

Mr. Salter did, however, agree there has been some hostility toward the carp in this country and he also said the carp was difficult to clean. (“You have to bleed ‘em,” he said. Ugh.)

I also read a piece by veteran outdoor writer Charlie Elliot, who defended the carp, saying if prepared correctly it makes a delicious meal and that carp are fun to fish for because they will bite anything, such as doughballs made of everything from cornmeal to powdered crackers, peanut butter, onions, and Jell-O.

Perhaps I could have changed my grandfather’s mind about the carp had the Times story broken while he was still alive.

“You know the Times,” I could have said to him. “‘All the news that’s fit to print.’”

“That’s one thing,” my grandfather likely would have said, “but ‘all the fish that’s fit to eat’ is quite another.”