If you get a chance, drop me a line.

No, don't call or text me. Come fishing with me.As a kid, I often rescued myself from my unhappy family by bike riding to New Market Pond. My friend Eddie and I would spend the entire day catching carp, frogs and turtles. Eddie was such a cool kid at the pond, but everywhere else he was a terror. After several school suspensions, I lost contact when he was sent to a juvenile hall for breaking into a local grocery store.My Uncle Al took me fishing once in the Kingston River. He told me if I got a bite to pull up hard on the rod. I got a bite, yanked the rod and out popped a small catfish that flew over my head and landed in a tall tree behind me. Uncle Al looked up and decided to cut the line. We left the catfish swinging from the line as if someone had lynched the poor thing for eating an innocent worm.Today I fish in a nearby lake. The bass are big and the pickerel are long. Yet that's not why I have a waiting list of guys who want to climb into my 12-foot aluminum boat.Stand two guys around a grill, each with a beer in his hands, and they will talk sports, women, jobs and money. Put the same two guys in a boat on a calm lake with the morning sun rising, and they share feelings about their loves, their fears, their mistakes and their dreams.Nick speaks about how much he loves his wife, but he's worried she has lost her feelings for him.Frank talks about his latest medical tests that have revealed liver cancer. He says he's not afraid to die, but he fears leaving his wife and children alone.Dave regrets squandering his money at the casino, leaving him so broke he thinks he may lose his house to foreclosure.Charley chats about his secret desire to start his own ice cream store once he saves up enough money to quit his dead-end job.So what is it about the sun's sparkle off the surface of a blue lake coupled with the scent of nature from a summer morning breeze that makes men want to spill out the contents of their hearts?Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th century essayist, wrote that nature erases all egotism and opens us up to see the truth as if we were looking through the eyes of a child.Henry David Thoreau, who lived for two years in the woods at a place called Walden Pond, said, "Many men go fishing their whole lives without knowing that it's not the fish they are after."I have always felt that the male gender has difficulty with sharing heartfelt feelings within the worlds they live in. Even between men who do not know each other well, the lake, the sun, the breeze and the cast of the line open those closed hearts to reveal an honesty never before shared.Catching fish is a bonus. The other day, while Dave was lamenting his lifelong failures with women, he hooked a small perch, and as it wriggled its way into his hand, he stopped his despair. He simply laughed like an 8-year-old kid. As he put his catch back into the water, he did so with such a gentle touch I wondered why any lady wouldn't enjoy this man's company.When Tiger Woods needs to ease his mind, he goes fishing. Comedian Jeff Foxworthy says, "Look where Jesus went to pick his people. He didn't go to the colleges. He picked his guys right off the fishing docks."When I fish alone, the lake brings me to a sense of my own immortality. Someday I will return beyond this universe to live forever on the shores of a beautiful body of fresh water like the one I fish now.I just hope that when God opens the gate for me, he hands me a Cabela's catalog. I will need a wide selection of rubber worms for those largemouth bass that swim in Heaven's Lake.