Joshua's Spot: Fear of... fish??

It's more than a little bit belated, but I have to relate a story.

For quite a while before my parents' last visit, Josh, his Pop-Pop, and I were all increasingly eager for Pop-Pop to teach Josh how to fish. It's such a quintessential Midwestern/Smith/little-boy-and-grandpa thing to do, involving all kinds of things that we thought Josh would be soooo into, like digging around in the garden looking for worms, putting the worms into a can and putting the lid on, going down to the lake at the park, watching the bobber float in the water, catching fish... I mean, every part of that sounded absolutely designed to appeal to every last bit of Josh's very boyish personality.

Once Pop-Pop got here, the buildup lasted weeks, and went very well indeed. They went shopping together for just the right fishing pole and reel and bobber set and hooks, and Josh trotted around with it proudly for days. They dug worms together, which apparently wasn't entirely a success, since Josh (as I recall) was kind of tired and cranky at the time and wound up getting threatened with a time out because he wasn't doing what Pop-Pop asked him to do. (Pop-Pop, more than likely, was tired and cranky too, which might have contributed to the whole clash of wills problem, but I digress.) Going to the park with Grandma and Pop-Pop was, predictably, a huge hit as ideas go, and they had no trouble getting him down there.

Everything was apparently going just fine until, to everyone's shock, Pop-Pop actually caught a little tiny fish, in a pond that I had thought to be nothing but a snag-magnet with nothing scaly in it at all. At this point, the whole idyllic picture we all had in our minds of the grandpa-and-little-boy fishing trip shattered against the hard wall of Josh's... fear of fish.

It seems that Josh started crying hysterically and ran to Grandma, and wanted nothing more to do with Pop-Pop or fishing or fishing poles or anything else from that point on. Grandma had to keep holding him and comforting him while Pop-Pop freed the fish, put the gear away, and packed up to leave the park. And that was the end of fishing, at least for now.

The reason I bring this up now, six weeks or so after the fact, is that Josh is still talking about it. Every time he sees something that makes him think of fish, he'll start telling me the story. Just this morning he saw this fish-shaped trivet that we keep on the stove sitting in the dish-drying rack, and he announced "I don't like fish." To which I stupidly (not knowing what he was thinking about) replied, "Well, that's okay, because we don't have fish for breakfast; that would be really weird, wouldn't it."

He looked at me like I'd just said the stupidest, most irrelevant thing in the world, and went on with his tale: "I cried."

At which point I finally got the clue, and rejoined the conversation. "You did? Did the fish scare you?"

"Yeah. I wanted Grandma."

"And did Grandma make you feel better?"

"Yeah. She held me."

"Why did the fish scare you?"

"I didn't like it. Pop-Pop caught it."

"Yeah, he did. Did that surprise you?"

"Yeah. He put it back. Grandma held me. I cried."

This is how our conversations go these days. (Mind you, I'm editing out a fair number of "ums," halts, repeated words, and mid-sentence revisions on his part. Not to mention a few on my part, too.) What surprised me is that 1) he's still remembering something so many weeks later, and 2) that he's making some pretty distant symbolic associations, like, say, between a fish-shaped trivet and his grandpa catching a fish weeks ago. Intriguing, the way his little mind is working.

Incidentally, he's also discovered the fine art of inflection - you know, that rising note at the end of every sentence that makes Valley Girl talk so, like, annoying? That turns every sentence into a question? This would be really cute and would mark great progress in his speech if he weren't overusing it? And exaggerating it? You know?