"James and Jimmy"
“Hey Jimmy! You got a bunch of floaters here”, Bobby Sprecker yelled as he and his eleven year old son, Bobby Jr., stood waiting patiently on the other side of the store.
“I’ll be right there Mr. Sprecker” answered James, as he preferred to be called.
“My name is James, not Jimmy,” James muttered to himself “James, James, James, why is that so hard to remember? No wonder nobody wants to live up here anymore, this town is full of Cretans.”
“You can’t sell dead minnows Jimmy” laughed Bobby and his son.
James didn’t have a lot of time lately to attend to the numerous details of running a bait store. The fact that he hated to fish did not help.
“I’m real sorry about your daddy and all” commiserated a second customer sitting at the end of the counter. He wasn’t really a customer because customers usually, eventually, at some point actually purchase something. Ralph Krakow, however, spends every morning drinking James’ free coffee and tries his best to distract James from conducting his business. Sometime last month Ralph moved James’ stool away from the cash register to the end of the counter, where the feet of the stool matched four wear marks in the wood floor perfectly, complaining about his bad back, “from the war you know”.
“Jimmy, your daddy was like family you know” continued old Ralph, “he was always here for us.”
He was always here for us. James heard those words a lot over the last few weeks. All during the funeral and afterwards, these people that James hadn’t seen or talked to for twenty years told James how good it was to see him again and they wondered how his accounting job “down in Chicago” was going and how he and his wife Margaret were doing and what was he getting his son Ryan for his tenth birthday.
These people always concerned themselves with everyone else’s lives and James didn’t appreciate it.
Growing up, Jimmy hated this small town and all the small minded, nosey people who lived in it. Jimmy especially hated the bait shop. It was the bait shop that kept his dad from spending time with Jimmy. Always working, never having time for the family didn’t even have time to take his son fishing.
“It’s OK, I don’t really like to fish” ten year old Jimmy would say to this apologetic dad, who once again broke a promise to take Jimmy fishing.
Leaving town after high school and never coming back seemed to be the most logical next step in Jimmy’s life.
“Yeah, your daddy always knew what to say to folks” old Ralph continued. “I remember just last summer your daddy asked Bobby Sprecker over there, ‘where his treasure was’. Well Bobby didn’t answer ‘cause he didn’t know what your daddy meant, I guess. Your daddy said ‘Bobby, you work all the time and the only time I see you in here is with one of your customers from work. You have time to take these strangers fishing but I never see you in here with your own son.’”
“So now Bobby is kind of agitated if you know what I mean and gets all red in the face and tried to explain him self. Bobby said to your daddy, ‘well I asked Bobby Jr. to join me and my customers but he said that he didn’t really like to fish. So I never asked him again.’”
“Well your daddy leaned in real close to Bobby, eye to eye, you know and said real quiet like, ‘Bobby, your family is your treasure and you need to treat them that way. Your customers don’t really care about you, but your son loves you. Bobby, you need to find out what Bobby Jr. likes to do and then do it with him.’” Old Ralph continued “well Bobby got all red in the eyes and had to look down. Then he said to your daddy ‘I suppose it’s too late now to start doing something with him?’ Your daddy said without even hesitating ‘heck no its never too late, just start talking to him’” Then Old Ralph leaned in real close to James and asked very quietly “pretty good advice, don’t you think? So Jimmy, where do you take Ryan fishing?”
“I don’t really like to ….” James started to answer with his standard explanation but paused. Then Jimmy asked “Do you know where the big ones are?”