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tourbi
Age: 57 Zodiac: 
| Joined: 09 Jan 2008 |
| Posts: 2640 |
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Location: tourbiland, at the foot of Pikes Peak, USA
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 Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 4:53 pm |
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Gimme a Call
Mark VanLaeys
As told to Emily VanLaeys
A few years back I was working as a physician’s assistant at a rural New York health clinic. A doctor who was relatively new to the area was taking a tour of our facility when I met him in the hall. He wore a baseball cap with the word “TROUT” sewn across the front of it. After we were introduced, I said, “I assume you fish?”
“Yes, I do,” he replied.
“Would you be interested in going fishing with me sometime?” I asked. “I just got into fishing recently, and I’d like to go with someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“Sure,” he said. “Give me a call sometime and we’ll go!”
On my way home from work that night, I thought about all the times I’d made tentative plans to get together with someone and never followed up on them. This time I’m going to do it, I thought. So as soon as I got home, I looked up his name in the phone book and called him. When he answered the phone I said: “Hi, this is Mark. I was thinking we should make plans to go fishing instead of just talking about it. How about tomorrow morning?”
The phone connection wasn’t very good, but I heard him respond, “Good idea. Where do you want to go?”
“We could take my canoe up the Susquehanna River,”
I suggested.
“Well, do you have hip waders?” he asked.
“No, but I have some knee-high boots.”
“Okay,” he said. “But how about meeting at my house and we could go trout fishing in the creek nearby instead of hassling with your canoe?” I liked his suggestion better. He then gave me directions to his house and told me to be there by 6 a.m.
The next morning, I followed his directions and found myself driving my pickup down the driveway of a beautiful estate. Usually new doctors are weighed down with a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of school loans, so I was surprised by these surroundings. As I pulled up next to the house, he came out to meet me. In the twilight of dawn and without his cap, he looked different than he had the day before. I was startled to see that he had gray hair.
“Hello,” he said. “Why don’t we take my van? It has all my fishing gear in it.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
“I’ll be back in a minute; I have to get something.” He disappeared into the house and returned a few minutes later with a pair of hip waders. “What size shoe do you wear?”
“Nine-and-a-half.”
“Well, these are a ten. I came across them at a yard sale the other day. They must have been meant for you!”
I thanked him and we both got into the van. It was then we looked at each other close-up for the first time that morning. The mystified look on his face must have mirrored my own.
“I don’t know you!” I exclaimed.
“And I certainly don’t know you!” he replied.
“So I didn’t meet you at the clinic yesterday?” I asked.
“No. I thought you were the guy I sat next to at a fly tying class I took a couple of years ago. I couldn’t remember his name, but he had said we should go fishing sometime.”
It turned out I had dialed the wrong number by one digit and connected with another fisherman who lived about five miles from the doctor I had originally met. The mistakenly identified fisherman and I went fishing anyway. It turned out that we had a lot in common, so we had a great time.
I learned a lot about fishing from him, gained a pair of old hip waders and made a new friend.
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