Pearly-Eyed Wobbler

One of the sternest lectures Dad ever gave me resulted from the time I ordered a ranch-style breakfast. My more sensible brother ordered ham, egg and toast. But, shoot! We were vacationing and had a big day ahead of us, swimming in the Gulf. I needed a real man’s breakfast to hold me up.

What I got was ham, egg and toast … plus a little plastic saguaro cactus stuck in an orange slice. My brother’s breakfast cost $1.99. Mine cost $5.99. You would have thought this experience made me more mindful of modifiers. But it didn’t. As a boy I was addicted to adjectives. The more adjectives that were used to describe something, the more likely I was to fall for it, never heeding Mark Twain’s words of wisdom: “Whenever it takes a whole basketful of sesquipedalian adjectives to describe something, it’s time for suspicion.” Heck, I was only twelve years old. How was I supposed to know that? And so it was, one fateful night as I lay curled up in bed reading my favorite fishing magazine, a picture fairly jumped off the page at me. A plethora of superlatives described it as a deadly new lure: the pearly-eyed wobbler.

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Now, the pearly-eyed wobbler was nothing more than a shiny chrome spoon with treble hooks on one end and two genuine plastic pearl eyes on the other. Chunk it down by any self-respecting fish and he’d jump out on the bank, preferring to take his chances with asphyxiation rather than coexist in the same murky medium with the wobbler. But I was hooked, especially since it was guaranteed to catch any finny denizen that swims. Had I only known then what I know now: Lures are designed to catch fishermen, not fish. I ordered old Pearly Eyes, then drifted off to sleep, dreaming about the angling conquests ahead. Fact is, my imagination ran wild – hallucinatin’ wild. I had no doubt I would slaughter your common ordinary fishes like crappie, bream, catfish, and bass, but I also dreamed about the more exotic ichthyoids my mentor Jaybird swore lurked in our fishing holes. For instance, there were brown-bellied bottom bumpers, chartreuse-crested cricket crunchers, deep-diving death dealers, evil-eyed everything eaters, fantastic-finned frog filchers, green-gilled grub gobblers, liver-lipped lure lurchers, mealy-mouthed minnow munchers, ordinary orange omnivorous obliterators, ruby-red reel ruiners, stripèd-scaled shiner snatchers, tiger-toothed troublemakers, and unbelievably ugly underwater undulators. I was screaming, “Get the net! Get the net!” when Mama shook me awake. The truth is, I never caught a thing with the pearly-eyed wobbler, although I keep it in my tackle box to this day as a reminder of how adjectives mislead gullible souls. So, Mr. and Mrs. American Consumer, when you go shopping and decide to buy a certain product, read the label closely. And be wary of those modifiers! Remember what carnival magnate P. T. Barnum once said: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” I was one; don’t you be one. Don’t get hooked by the pearly-eyed wobbler.