Fishing Buddy

Mine is patient and steadfast. He's also my husband.

“Did you read my Substack?” I ask Sam, a prelude to exactly what my mother cautioned me against as a child: fishing for compliments.

Sam knows I operate with reliable insecurity. “Yes, it was good. I clicked the like button,” he says. I am mollified until he adds, “Did you leave a word out intentionally”?

“Did I? I don’t know. It was a poem, so maybe I was being inventive. Show me.”

Sam obligingly shifts from examining the Home Depot site for some kind of obscure window hinge to my Substack page. “There,” he points. “Did you mean to say “but that’s not what want to tell you?”

“Fuck,” I say. “Shit! No!” I frantically hit edit, inserting the missing “I” (make that an “i” because I am trying out being grammatically/semantically playful with my poetry) but in the meantime I’m thinking my entire email list must be appalled at my careless proofreading.

“Did you want to use some kind of end punctuation on that same line after you?” Sam asks.

“Like I said, it’s a poem. I’m working outside convention.”

He nods his head, though I myself don’t know what I mean. I could launch into a sanctimonious explanation of poems connoting feeling and freedom from traditional form creates opportunity for self-expression and is a statement in and of itself, but that’s just pretentious hooey. I understand that what matters here is that I appreciate Sam reading closely enough to catch the missing i. That he takes the time to tell me about it. That for as long as I’ve known him, he has been my never-fail fishing spot. Truth be told, I would have quit casting about not for mere compliments, but words; I’d have given all this up long ago, but for him.