Thursday's theme is fish. I don't particularly care for fish, I don't like to fish, I don't own fish, what's to say about fish? Well, there's this. When I was nine years old, I nearly slept with the fish. And it was not because I was on a Mafia hit list for kids. It was because I might have ignored the fact that I couldn't swim and nearly drowned in a lake. In Omaha, Nebraska in the late fifties, suburban moms didn't load their kids into their SUVs and take them to "lessons". That included swim lessons. In fact, the SUV wasn't even invented. Those moms that drove and there weren't many, drove station wagons. A step up from Conestoga wagons, but certainly no SUV. But I digress. I didn't learn to swim until I was about ten. Swimming lessons in my neighborhood involved jumping into the pool and acting like you were swimming. If you didn't actually swim, you headed to the shallow end or you sank. I spent a lot of time in the shallow end. One Saturday, my dad loaded us all up in the car and took us to a lake for a barbecue with the guys from his work. There was a lot of beer to be drunk at the barbecue and whenever there was a lot of beer to be drunk, my old dad did his share. He was that kind of guy. Anyway, I was hanging around the lake with a couple of other kids and someone got the bright idea to climb on a log and ride it into the lake. Despite the fact that I couldn't swim, I hopped on too, because I was a follower. Things were going along pretty well until someone got the brilliant idea to rock the log, with the predictable results, one of the other kids fell off. When one guy falls off a log in the middle of a lake, anyone left on the log is pretty much doomed to the same fate. I know this for sure, because I fell off and sank into the lake like a rock. I recall flailing and frantically trying to breath. I managed to pop my head up above water and I could see people on the shore watching me. Then I sank again. One of the times I bobbed to the surface, I saw my father sitting on a horse on the shore looking on. A horse, you say? Why yes, having ingested a large quantity of beer, my dad decided that or bragged to his drunken pals, he could ride a horse. So, he went to a nearby stable and rented a horse, just to prove his point. The last thing a drowning kid wants to see when he is drowning, is his drunken old man sitting on a horse watching the proceedings like a general surveying the battlefield. What he really wants to see is his old man swimming to his rescue. Didn't happen, which is probably good, because he might have drowned us both trying to save me. Plus the horse would have probably kicked me in the head. Instead, a teenage kid, who was a lifeguard, swam out and pulled my scrawny butt to safety. All's well that end's well. I was grateful not to have drowned, even if it meant catching hell for nearly ruining a perfectly good picnic. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky