Along the little stone bridge, fishing lines dangled down to the water while locals chatted with one another about nothing in particular. People had fished from this historic bridge for over 100 years. It was a sunny Saturday morning and Shirley and I dragged our bamboo poles bumping the ends of them on the sidewalk to join the others. I kicked a stone or two along with way with the toe of my old brown shoe.

            “Do you think we’ll catch anything today?” I asked Shirley.

            “Probably just some little ones not big enough to take home,” I said. 

            I am not sure why we went to this bridge. It was just something people did on Saturday mornings. It was a place to meet; and sometimes old Joe Finch was there loafing at the far end of the bridge, not fishing, but telling tales about when he grew up in the small town and fished off the same bridge. He told us about the people who built the bridge and how they had hand cut the stones and hauled them in by horse drawn wagons. We liked hearing his stories and always wondered what he would tell us next.

            “When I was a boy,’ he would say, “we caught fish this long,” stretching out his hands to show us just how long the fish was.” We believed every word he told us though it could not have been true. No fish was that big here in our little creek, but we always hoped we could catch a big one too.

            Shirley and I listen with curiosity as old Joe started to tell us his secrets of how to catch really big fish.

            “Ya’ have to have the right bait,” he would say. “Fishin’ worms won’t catch these fish. They’re way too smart for ordinary bait,” he reasoned. It has to be somethin’ out of the ordinary. Yes, sir-e. It’s something most of us don’t have.”

            Before we found out the secret, he would always say, “Gotta’ go now. Ya’all come back next Saturday and I’ll tell you.”

            We both knew that he never gave out his secrets for catching fish but we naively came back Saturday after Saturday. We caught our tiny fish and thought we were lucky at that.

            When old Joe left, we took our poles to a bare spot on the bridge and lowered the lines down to the water to wait for our catch of the day, chatting with others around us.

            Not a nibble. “Let’s go,” Shirley said after only a few minutes.

            “I think I know what old Joe’s secret bait was,” I said to Shirley.

            “How would you know that,” she asked. “He didn’t give us a clue,” she said.

            “I think he gave us a hint,” I said thinking back on his conversation. “Remember when he said, ‘it’s something most of us don’t have’”?

            “Yes,” I remembered him saying that.

            “What do you suppose it could be,” I wondered.

            “What are we lacking when we try to catch fish?” Shirley asked.

            “I know what I don’t have,” I said emphatically. “It’s patience.”

            “That must be why we don’t catch any fish,” Shirley agreed. “We don’t wait long enough for fish to bite.”

            On our way home that day we both agreed that neither of us had enough patience to catch little fish let alone big ones. Old Joe must have known the secret.