Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 9 cut your eye-teeth on, chambering a .22 short from the box you've saved all the years, and sitting on a hickory ridge shivering for daylight and a bushytail to climb out of bed. And it's good and even fine, but not like the first time. Not like actually being there and feeling the magic the way you could then. There's no kiss like a first kiss. You can argue that if fishing is "a perpetual series of occasions for hope," as someone has observed, then the balance of our lives is as similarly a never-ending prospectus for retrieving wonder . . . the freshly, incomparable fascination we knew as a child. A restless search to rediscover how it felt again. So, we book for Arizona, and then Help a boy at being a boy, and you'll give him the means to being a man. Mike Gaddis i r s t L i g h t F B oys. Ha! A merry bag of blessings, being a boy. I was a boy once. Prospecting in the back-forty wilds, wilderness and wonderlands between infancy and seventeen. A happy hoot, I recall, being a boy. Problem is, it's kinda like Toyland. "Once you're past its borders, you can n'er return again." You can try, and most of us do, the older we get perhaps the more—a hankering to go sit on the creek bank, in the sun and shadow of a lazy summer afternoon, under a crooked old gum tree, barefoot with your toes in the water, dabbling a worm for a redbreast under a cane and cork- stopper; or picking up again the .22 you S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 9