The Patented, Pink, Plastic, Pearly-Eyed Wobbler

My boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird was tight with his money, and expecting me to be likewise, couldn’t believe I got suckered in by an advertisement in a fishing magazine guaranteeing that no fish could resist the patented, pink, plastic, pearly-eyed wobbler. I ordered the lure, and when it arrived, I couldn’t wait to show it to him, knowing he would agree that it was a “guaranteed sho-nuff fish killer.” I was deeply disappointed by his rude response.

“Boy, that’s the ugliest piece o’ junk any fool ever wasted good money on. It’s guaranteed all right — guaranteed to make fish leap out of the water and on the bank, trying to escape from it. Don’t ever waste money on something that foolish again. Tell you what — let’s go fishing tomorrow, and for every fish you catch with your patented, pink, plastic, pearly-eyed wobbler, I will pay you ten dollars.” After his stern scolding, I should have become more mindful of misleading modifiers, but I wasn’t. As a boy I was addicted to adjectives. The more of them that were used to describe something, the more likely I was to fall for it, never heeding Mark Twain’s wise words: “Whenever a whole basketful of sesquipedalian adjectives are used to describe something, it’s time for suspicion.” Heck, I was only twelve years old. How was I supposed to know that? The patented, pink, plastic, pearly-eyed wobbler was nothing more than a spoon with a treble hook on one end and two blood-red, genuine plastic pearl eyes on the other, but I was convinced it would catch fish, and I couldn’t wait to make a believer out of Jaybird — and get paid for doing it. Had I only known then what I know now: Lures are designed to catch fishermen, not fish. That night, I drifted off to sleep, dreaming about the next day’s fishing trip. In my dream, my imagination ran wild – hallucinating wild. I had no doubt I would slaughter crappie, bream, perch, catfish, and bass, but also I dreamed about some of the more exciting game fish that Jaybird swore lurked in our favorite fishing hole.

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Using his powerful imagination, he described such trophy monsters as the brown-bellied bottom bumper, deep-diving death dealer, evil-eyed everything eater, green-gilled grub gobbler, mealy-mouthed minnow muncher, ruby-red reel ruiner, tiger-toothed troublemaker, and the unbelievably ugly undulating underwater undertaker. I was screaming, “Get the net! Get the net!” when Mama shook me awake. The truth is, I never caught a single fish with the wobbler, although I keep it in my tackle box to this day as a reminder of how adjectives mislead gullible souls. In his own way, the wise old black man taught me yet another valuable life lesson: Be wary of advertisements. He would have agreed with carnival magnate P. T. Barnum who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and told me so: “You got suckered, boy. Now we both know what caught you: the patented, pink, plastic, pearly-eyed wobbler.”