Where's the Good News?

On top of everything else that seems to be going wrong in this world, comes now the news that there's a catfish shortage!

Say it isn't so.

When I was a kid, my grand-dad, an agricultural-American, wanted to get in on the ground floor of the coming wave that would see a shift from beef, pork and fowl to fish as a major protein source.  To this end he created a four or five acre impoundment (the big pond), with a hand operated outflow valve, which fed about a dozen small, rectangular fish ponds, neatly arranged in a row.  Each of the fish ponds measured about 25' by 120' or so, with about a 3' strip between them.

After the big pond was built, we were all (my five cousins and I) warned never to go swimming in the big pond.

Of course we did.

We were also warned not to shoot each other with BB guns.

We followed that instruction, sort of.  Nobody said you couldn't skip a BB off the surface of one of the small ponds, on the chance that you might zap a cousin on the other side.  Thankfully, no one ever lost an eye (there but for Grace...).  And it was likewise not prohibited to shoot one's cousin's equine mount in the rump (from a reasonable distance) while he was riding it, for comedic effect.

Anyway, we would sometimes volunteer, sometimes get volunteered, to go down to the fish ponds to feed the catfish, with 3# coffee cans and 50# bags of what looked like dog food.  Like going to the Japanese Gardens, the water would roil with fish with every handful of feed tossed into the pond.

Sometimes, on hot summer days, we'd swim in the catfish ponds, and sometimes we'd seine the ponds, about 3' deep or so, to see how many fish they contained.  (Not necessarily so many, but frequently there were snakes - moccasins, I assume - I tried not to get acquainted on a personal level.  How we kept from getting bit, I don't know.)

I never really knew if Grand-dad sold any fish from the operation.  My intuition tells me it was probably a lark, and never became a serious business venture.

Maybe Babe's can hire some Okie noodlers to supply catfish to their restaurants.