My wife thinks I spent last weekend standing in a cold river in Arkansas, catching nothing, the way I have allegedly done every spring for the last forty years.
I have never caught a fish in my life. I have never tried. The fishing trip has always been a polite fiction the three of us agreed on a long time ago, a thing you say to a wife so she pictures you bored and harmless instead of asking too many questions. For forty years it was true enough. We really did go somewhere. We really were harmless.
Last weekend we were not harmless. Last weekend we drove a rented red convertible to Branson, Missouri, and by Sunday I had aged either ten years or negative thirty, depending on how you count.
Let me back up.
There are three of us. Buck, Stan, and me. Buck is sixty-eight and built like a man who has enjoyed every single meal of his life without apology. Stan is seventy-one and has never once in those seventy-one years left the house without checking the weather, the locks, and his own pulse. I am seventy-four, and somewhere along the way I became the one who drives, the one who holds the money, and the one everyone looks at when it is time to decide whether we are doing something stupid. I always say no. They always do it anyway.
For most of my life there were four of us. The fourth was Ray.
Ray was the loud one, which is saying something in a group that includes Buck. Ray talked with his hands. Ray cried at car commercials. Ray had a dream, one single dream he carried around for fifty years like a man carrying a fish he was sure he was going to catch someday, and the dream was this. The four of us. A convertible. The top down. Branson, Missouri, where the lights are loud and the shows are louder and nobody asks how old you are before they sell you a ticket.
Every year Ray brought it up. Every year, one of us had a knee, or a grandkid’s recital, or a roof that needed doing, and every year we said the same thing. Next year, Ray. Next year for sure.
Last spring Ray ran out of next years. It was quick, which everybody says is a blessing, and it is, and it also is not, because quick means you never get the conversation you assumed you had time for. We buried him on a Tuesday. I gave a little talk. I did not mention Branson because I could not get the word out without my voice doing something I did not want it to do in front of people.
Then a few months later the doctor sat Buck down and looked at some numbers and said the words “slow down” and “take it easy,” and Buck came out of that office, called me, and did not say hello. He said, “Hank. I am not going to be the guy who said next year and then ran out of next years too.”
Two days after that there was a red convertible in my driveway and Buck standing next to it grinning like a man who had already decided how this was going to go.
We told the wives it was fishing.
I want to be honest about why, because it was not really about getting away with anything. If we had told Carol and Loretta and Buck’s wife Diane the truth, they would not have said no. What they would have said is, “Well, then I’m coming,” and, “Let me make some calls,” and, “Buck, did you clear this with your cardiologist,” and a beautiful, stupid, important thing would have quietly turned into a sensible group activity with a packing list. And this was never going to be sensible. This was for Ray. Ray did not do sensible.
So we said fishing. Stan, who cannot lie to save his life, practiced saying it in the mirror. I heard him.
The drive there is the part I would do again tomorrow. Three hundred miles with the top down, Buck in the passenger seat with his shirt mostly off and both arms thrown straight up into the wind like he was being arrested by joy, Stan in the back wrestling a paper map the size of a bedsheet because he does not trust the phone, the phone does not trust him either, and somewhere around the second hour the map got away from him entirely and tried to leave the vehicle. I have never laughed so hard while doing seventy. I had to pull over. We were not even lost. Stan just likes to know where he is at all times, and a map is how a man his age holds onto the feeling that he is in charge of something.
We pulled into Branson at dusk with the whole strip lit up like a slot machine, and Buck stood up in his seat, which you are not supposed to do, and hollered something I will not repeat, and an entire family on the sidewalk applauded. That was the moment I understood the weekend was no longer mine to manage.
I am going to tell you what happened, but I am going to ask you to remember that we are old men, and that whatever picture is forming in your head, the reality was almost certainly slower and creakier and required more bathroom breaks.
There was a show the first night. One of those big variety theaters, a fellow doing impressions and a band and a comedian who made the mistake of asking the front rows where everybody was from. Buck answered. Loudly. Buck answered every question after that too, whether it was directed at him or not, and by the end of the first set the comedian had given up and was simply running his show through Buck, and the crowd loved it, and a woman two rows back laughed so hard she had to be checked on. That woman, it turned out, was traveling with two others. A church group. From Tulsa.
I am not going to say much about the women from Tulsa, partly because a gentleman does not, and partly because one of them is, I have reason to believe, reading this. I will say only that their names were Dot, Pat, and a third I will protect, that Dot could dance in a way that should be illegal at any age, and that Stan, our Stan, anxious Stan, Stan who checks his pulse, danced with Pat for an hour and a half and forgot, for the first time I have witnessed in years, to be afraid of anything. I watched him out there. I thought, Ray, you should see this. Stan is dancing.
The buffet I will mention only briefly, out of respect for the establishment, which did nothing to deserve us. I will say that Stan wore a fanny pack to dinner, that it was not empty when we left, and that there is a dinner roll situation I am legally advising my friends not to discuss. The boy refilling the carving station looked at Buck’s plate the way you look at a weather event.
And then there was Saturday night.
We had been putting it off without saying we were putting it off. Buck had carried a small thing in his jacket pocket the whole trip, and I had pretended not to notice, and Stan had definitely noticed and said nothing, which for Stan is a heroic act of restraint. Around eleven o’clock we found ourselves out behind the motel in a gravel lot, the noise of the strip going soft a few blocks away, and Buck took the small thing out of his pocket. It was a flask. Ray’s flask. The dented one with the worn initials that Ray took everywhere and never actually drank much out of, because Ray liked the idea of being the kind of man who carried a flask more than he liked whiskey.
Buck poured three fingers into the cap and one onto the gravel for the fourth of us, and we stood there, three old fools in a parking lot in Missouri, and we told Ray we were sorry it took us this long. I told him the part I never got to say at the funeral. Buck cried, which surprised no one. Stan cried, which surprised everyone, including Stan. And then Buck laughed and said, “He would hate that we’re being this sappy,” and he was right, so we stopped, and we drank to him, and we went and found the women from Tulsa again because Ray would have wanted the night to keep going, not end on the sad part.
That is the moment I will remember for the rest of my life. I am not going to pretend it was the goat.
But I did promise you a goat.
Sunday morning I woke up to a sound that no motel room should make. I will describe it as a cross between a lawnmower and an opinion. I opened my eyes and there was a goat. A live goat. Standing in our room, calmly, eating one of Stan’s socks, looking at me like I was the one who did not belong there.
It is a long story how the goat got there, and it involves the petting zoo attached to a Saturday afternoon attraction, a gate Buck swears he did not open, a sequence of events Stan refuses to confirm or deny, and a young man in a polo shirt who, by Sunday morning, was knocking on doors up and down the motel asking, very politely, if anyone had seen a goat. We gave the goat back. I want that on the record. We returned the goat in good condition, minus one sock.
We got caught, of course. Not by the goat. By Facebook. The woman from the first night, the one who had to be checked on, posted a video of Buck running the comedy show, and tagged the theater, and the theater shared it, and somewhere in northwest Arkansas three wives who believed their husbands were standing in a cold river watched their men in a red convertible with the top down, very much not fishing. Loretta did not call me. She simply texted the video back to me with no words. I have been married forty-six years. I knew exactly how much trouble I was in from the absence of words.
We are, as I mentioned, no longer permitted to plan our own vacations. There is talk of a group trip next year, with the wives, to somewhere sensible. I am sure it will be lovely.
But here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I think Ray was actually trying to tell us all those years when he would not shut up about a convertible and some lights in Missouri. It was never really about Branson. Branson is a town with a lot of theaters and a buffet that is still recovering. It was about not saying next year one time too many. It was about three old men deciding that “slow down” is advice, not a sentence, and that some things you do not get to put off forever, and the list of those things is longer than you think and it gets shorter every year whether you do anything about it or not.
So we went. Late, and lying about it, and with a goat we did not plan for. But we went.
If you have still got a Ray in your life, the one who keeps bringing up the trip you keep not taking, do me a favor. Take the trip. Take it this year. Take it while he is still in the passenger seat with both arms in the wind, and not riding along in a flask in your jacket pocket, getting poured onto the gravel because you waited too long.
We waited too long. We still went. I would not trade that weekend for a quiet life, and Lord knows I am about to get one.
Catch you next spring. I hear the fishing’s good
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.