A Lot of Life Left

The aroma of buttered, salty popcorn permeates the lobby of Northgate Cinemas, and nothing -- except maybe the chocolate cake Mom makes me on my birthday -- could smell any better to a 10-year-old.

It's the height of summer in Cincinnati in 1975, June 21, and my favorite baseball team, the Reds, just clobbered the Houston Astros last night 7-3 to increase their lead in the National League's Western Division to three games over those dirty Los Angeles Dodgers. I stayed up late -- it was a Friday night, after all, and summer vacation -- listening to the broadcast on 700 WLW. For a Reds fan, like me, 700 WLW's game broadcasts were like a symphony.

The local Catholic Church festivals are also starting to gear up, which I always look forward to because it gives me a chance to try to win another goldfish at one of the game booths. Three years in a row, I've won a goldfish playing the rubber ball Tic-Tac-Toe game at St. Aloysius of Gonzaga, but I just can't seem to keep them alive longer than a month. I'm hoping to break that streak this year -- I find fish not only beautiful, but interesting.

That's probably why I'm here, at Northgate Cinemas, for a matinee showing with my mom of this new movie which came out last night called "Jaws." According to mom, it's based on a book which came out a few years ago. She said she read it, and it kept her up all night after she finished it.

"It was a chilling novel," she told me in the car ride to the movie theater. "I'm really interested in seeing how they turn it into a movie."

I think she really wanted to see the movie because she'd thought I'd like it, since I was so obsessed with fish. Between winning goldfish at the church carnivals, to constantly re-reading my dog-eared copies of "Moby Dick" and "The Old Man and the Sea," to telling her how I hoped to get an aquarium for Christmas, I think she had the hint that I loved fish.

"I just want to see this big shark," I replied to her, as she pulled into the theater parking lot. "They're one of the biggest fish in the world. Only whales are bigger!"

Trips to the movies were a once-a-month treat for Mom and me, but this one felt a little more special than the others. I'm not sure if it was because it was more of an adult movie -- we always went to movies like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" or "Black Beauty," or because the main character was a shark, or because she had promised that after the movie, she'd take me down to Children's Palace and let me pick out any fish-related toy I wanted.

Whatever the reason, it was shaping up to be a big day, one of the biggest ever, in my 10-year-old life, with one of the people I loved the most.

2.

It had been just the two of us, Mom and me, since I was five, when the two soldiers in the dress uniforms rang the doorbell at our house on Meadowview Drive.

I was in the living room, sitting on the plaid loveseat and watching "The Brady Bunch," when she opened the front door and the soldiers told her, with their best impressions of sorrow and concern, that "the Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your husband, Thomas, was killed in action near the South Vietnam-Cambodian border on May 17, 1970, as part of the Sanctuary Counteroffensive operations against the North Vietnamese.

"The Secretary extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your tragic loss," the older one finished, as my Mom dropped her head and began sobbing. All I could register, in my five-year-old mind, was how shiny the soldiers' dress loafers were, and how they looked like black baseball spikes against the green turf covering the front porch.

Dad was the one who introduced me to the wonderful world of fish. It was right after he got his draft notice. He was 25, I was four. At that age, I didn't know what the draft was, or even what Vietnam was, but he did. I also think he knew, most likely, he wouldn't be coming back from Vietnam. So he did everything he could to cram a lifetime of fatherhood into a few short months with me before heading out to basic training.

Whether it was taking me to see the Reds, or trips to see The Happy Land of Hanna-Barbera at Kings Island, him and Mom spoiled me over those couple of months. I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world.

The one thing we did, though, just Dad and me, was go fishing. We went almost every weekend to Lake Gloria, a local pay lake, before he left. We'd sit there at the bank, our lines in the water and munching on bologna and cheese sandwiches. He taught me how to bait a hook, how to toss the line in the water, and how to slowly reel the line in, as to make it look like the worm was swimming through the water and to attract the fish.

"It's a challenging sport, but if done right, you'll catch fish all day long," I remembered him telling me. Challenging, indeed. Our first trip to Lake Gloria, I didn't catch a single fish and, like most kids that age, became quite bored with just sitting there and tossing a thin, nylon line into the water.

Our second trip was when I caught -- no pun intended -- the fishing bug, or I should say the love for fish in general. We had tossed our lines in, and I was slowly reeling mine back in, like he'd told me to, when the bobber on my line went underwater.

I remembered Dad telling me, on our first trip, that when that happens, it means a fish has latched on to the bait and is probably hooked. So I got excited.

"Dad, I think I've got one!" I exclaimed.

"Reel it in fast, now," he responded. "You can do it."

There are some moments in life which you wish you had a picture taken of that exact moment, or a painting done of it. One moment, for me, was pulling that bluegill out of the water, with it hooked to the line and its body thrashing about.

"Dad, what do I do with it?" I asked him, as that poor bluegill continued to squirm on the hook.

"Bring 'em here," Dad said, and he proceeded to grab the line and the bluegill by its body, swiftly yet gracefully remove the hook from its mouth, and kneel down to the bank and release it back into the water. The bluegill disappeared under the greenish water, gone as quickly as it had come up on my line.

"Why'd you do that?" I asked him. I was confused. I thought you caught fish then you were supposed to eat them. What was the point of catching fish if you turned around and let them go?

"That fish has a lot of life left," Dad told me. "Let it go live that life. It didn't do anything to deserve to die today. It was just hungry and wanted that worm.

"Fishing is more about the act than it is the result, Jimmy," he continued. "It's about spending time with the ones you love, and just enjoying the outdoors, and occasionally knowing you did something right when you catch a fish.

"You'll understand some day," Dad concluded, and went back to his lawnchair and fishing pole.

I caught a few more bluegill on our ensuing trips to Lake Gloria before Dad left. Except I was the one now grabbing them off the hook and turning them back into the water.

3.

I couldn't help thinking of Dad when Mom and me sat down in our seats in Theater 1 at Northgate Cinema. I wondered what he would have thought about a movie with what people were saying was a giant, killer shark eating people.

As for me, I was wondering why a shark would want to eat people in the first place.

Mom and me mowed through half our tub of popcorn before the movie even started -- it just tasted so good -- and it took everything in my power to not guzzle down the entirety of my red cream soda. Then, the lights dimmed and the movie began.

Over the next two hours, I thought I realized why the shark wanted to eat people. They were being really nasty toward it, putting a bounty on it, trying to shoot it, blowing it up at the end. If someone had been trying to do that to me, I'd be mad, too.

People were chattering as we all walked out of the theater after the ending credits. "You'll never catch me going in the ocean ever again!" one teenage girl, pocked with pimples, was telling her parents. "Neither will I!" her mom responded.

I didn't find the movie scary at all, myself. If anything, it made me even more curious about what goes through the minds of fish -- and sharks -- and why they act they way they act. What could provoke them to want to eat people?

"What did you think of the movie?" Mom asked me as we walked through the lobby. "For me, it didn't have some elements of the book, but it was pretty close to the book. I know one thing, I don't know when I'll want to go in the water next!"

"I loved it," I told her. "I understand why the shark was mad and trying to eat everybody. They were trying to kill it!"

"That's because it was eating people!" Mom chuckled back. "Would you want it to eat you? I don't think so."

"No, I guess not," I replied as we made it to the parking lot. "But it might not want to eat me if it knew I liked it."

"Oh, Jimmy, you are something," she cooed back while ruffling my hair. "I'm sure the shark would like you. C'mon, let's go to the toy store and get you that toy I promised you."

I picked out a Great White Shark rubber toy when we got to Children's Palace.

4.

The research assistant, I guess, had repeated the question. It was my first time hearing it, considering I was deep in my remembrances and staring intently on the rubber shark toy on my mahogany desk.

"I'm sorry," I uttered to the assistant, John, who was seated across the desk from me. "What was the question again? I was zoning out."

"I was just wondering what got you into marine biology, Dr. Haskins," John asked. "I like getting the backstory from people I'm working with."

"Oh, right. Sorry. Well, it's a long story so I'll give you the cliff notes," I replied. "It's because of a father who loved fishing, a mother who took her son to see 'Jaws,' and some dead goldfish from Catholic church festivals."

"Are you serious?" John asked curiously. "That's why?"

"Oh, not just that," I concluded. "It's because those fish have a lot of life left, and I want them to go live that life.

"They didn't do anything to deserve to die today."