Whenever Lorry and I get antsy here on Pine Island, we get off the island. But we never get very far. Yesterday we got as far as Matlacha, a neighborhing island. That's a distance of about six miles from our doorstep, if you're driving, which we were. But if you were paddling a canoe, it would only be a lot less. You'd cross Indian Fields and follow the mangroves until you got to "The Fishingest Bridge in the World."

Fifteen years ago my neighbor, Dick Newman gave me a T-shirt he created. In bold black letters it asks -- Where the Hell is Bokeelia? On the back, it resolves the problem -- "It's ten miles northwest of Matlacha." I love dearly love this T-shirt but it's getting holes in it and Dick doesn't have any more, not holes, T's.

So I'm wearing my T-shirt and Lorry and I stop in at The Old Fish House Marina where a very smiley lady chef named Jesse serves the best fried mullet you could ever eat. We ordered some, then went out back. It feels like you're under the bridge. The pelicans get as close as they can to the dining area. The palms are wind-battered and beautiful and the canal seeps through Matlacha, greenly and darkly on its way out to the sailboat-sunken Sound. The smell is salty and mangrovy and lowtide lovely, if that's the way you like it.

The mullet comes golden brown and so pretty you could eat them. Lorry and I share the basket. There are two brown crabcakes and three hushpuppies the way grandma used to make 'em. The fries are good too. Anyway, the first bite of that mullet and you know why you're here and not somewhere else. And the conversation -- that's something else. Two old salts are talking low about -- not fish -- but their latest songwriting contracts! They're dipping in and out of musical bylaws and gigs and the best and the worst guitar strings when the guy next to us says in a loud voice, "You see all them dead fish last winter?"

The talk moves from musical enterprise to how these guys really make their living, as fishermen. Algal blooms, redtides, they discuss it all including the fresh water releases from Lake Okeechobee, the Big O, and how this water affects our estuaries, and that sidelong talk between tables brings the subject to, well, what we were anticipating -- mullet.

How DO you cook mullet and get it gold as Goldilock's curls? I've cooked it many ways. Steamed it. Grilled it. Fried it. You ask most cooks how to fry a mullet, they'll shrug. "Few minutes on a side, hot oil." You can't draw them out any more than this, but I managed to corner Jesse and I looked right into her pretty blue eyes and asked, "How many minutes? Exactly."

She said, very crisply, "Three and a half. No more."

"So that's it?"

Jesse's face clouded for a second.

A secret, I'm thinking. And I would be right.

"You can't fry a mullet properly unless you roll them in this." She walked over to a big glass-front fridge and brought out a nice one pound bag of Bob's Red Mill Organic 100% Stone Ground Whole Grain Corn Flour.

Well, I never. "That's the trick?"

Jesse looks a trifle dreamy and then says, "Yes, that's about it."

"And the three-and-a-half each side?"

"In about one inches of hot, very hot, but not smoking, oil."

"Any kind of oil?" I ask.

"Any kind," Jesse replies.

"Where do I buy Bob's Red Mill?"

"You got one in your hand." She smiles.

"Well, thank you very, very much."

She met my eyes again, this time with real serious intent. "You know," she said, "mullet has the highest percentage of Omega fatty acid of any fish there is, except maybe anchovy, but we don't care much about them. And the mullet, as you know, is an estuary fish, lives in the fresh mostly but also in the salt, and it is a vegetarian, too, so you don't have to worry about the mercury content because there is none to be had in mullet."

I nodded with each fact, my appreciation rising.

"The fact is," I told her, "we just love to cook them and eat them."

"You say that after you just ate a big old fish basket full of mullet and crabcakes?" she said with a laugh.

"I'm still hungry for mullet," I told her. And because Old Fish House Marina sells freshly caught mullet, as well as other fish, Jesse was only too happy to sell me my dinner, two fine large mullet fillets.

As we left Jesse said, "One more thing. I know I said three-and-a-half minutes on each side, but that's here in my fryer. I don't know what you have."

"Big black Dutch oven," I told her.

"Love those," Jesse said. "Used to have one. Well, for one of those, maybe a little more time."

"How much more?" I asked.

She looked away. "Until they're golden brown," she said.

She wasn't going to say more. So I took my Corn Flour and my mullet and, after thanking her again, I turned to leave.

Jesse said, "Ever eat the gizzards?"

"Mullet has a gizzard?"

"Best part."

I shook my head. There's always something new you can learn. I guess you haven't lived until you've had a plate full of mullet gizzards by the bridge with the pelicans almost underfoot.

So we went home and I fried the fillets just right. Bob's Red Mill Corn Flour is, as they say, good enough to eat. Four minutes on a side, folks. They were golden brown.

I'll tell you the rest when I have the gizzards next week.




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We've had George the parrot for thirty years and he won't shut up unless he wants to. Parrot's prerogative. But sometimes I say, "George, if you don't pipe down, I'm gonna . . ." George cocks an evil eye, as if to say, "Yeah? What?"

There's really not much you can do. We have a hallway with a door leading to it and guests who stay in the room above the hall say there are ghosts that wander around there all night. The hall is always dark, day or night. We put George in the hall and close the door. He cries like a baby for a moment. Then gets quiet. Once, when I let him out of the closed hall, he said, "It's about time."

George is a talker, and like Karl's owl, a squaller. He can turn a room upside down with his caterwauling. (If you don't know what that means it's "catter wailing" or a cat carrying on at night; or perhaps a discombobulated owl. Oh, I don't know, you have to be here to know how much noise George can make.)

One time George was making so much noise, I told him the joke about the noisy parrot. The one where the owner says, "If you shoot your mouth off once more, I'm sticking you in the freezer." The parrot hollers bloody murder. The guy throws him in the freezer which is full of frozen chicken parts. A couple seconds later the owner feels sorry for the poor bird and opens the freezer. The dazed parrot steps out covered with frost, and says, "What did that other guy do?"

George didn't think the joke was funny. When I got to the end, he said, "Yeah?" Like it was supposed to have a better, or at least, a funnier, ending. He's pretty quick. Once I was on the phone with a telemarketer and I'd had it with the wheedling and the conniving, and I said, "I'm going to hang up on you!" I did, too. After which, I said -- "What a jerk!" George eyed me from across the room and said, "You're the jerk!"

Sometimes, however, George is quiet, and for all the right reasons, and none of them threatening. Two relatives of mine showed up at the house yesterday. The father, Herb, was a cousin I hadn't seen for forty, no, fifty, years. His daughter Cindy, well, I'd never met her before. It was a special occasion and my wife Lorry made the best egg salad in the world. Everyone said so. I gave some to George. I put a scoop in his bowl and said, "If you eat eggs, you're a cannibal." George looked at me, then he dug in.

After our guests left, I said to Lorry -- "It's really fun having friends for lunch."

Across the room, George said, "Cannibal."

My friend Karl has a way with words. I have been listening to him tell stories since I was a small boy. Today, he's 94. But he doesn't look it. He moves slow. But going down the stairs, and tricky, narrow stairs at that, he never holds the rail as I do, as everyone else does. Karl's stairs, the ones in his ancient house, are made like ship's stairs -- they go straight down.


Karl is a bit of a poet. The kind of poet I like best -- he acts out his poems and he says his words so that they are as sweet as maple sugar, or better yet, maple syrup. And speaking of maple syrup, we had some, Karl and I. At the Roadside Store in Monterey where you get a blueberry buckwheat pancake as big around as a hubcap and, well, the amount of syrup is your business. But I favor lots of it. We were celebrating Karl's 94th birthday two days ago when he looked up at me and said a poem about a storm so terrible it was almost unthinkable. And in the midst of the storm there are two people: a ship captain and his daughter. Of course, they are in what appears to be a sinking ship.

Now Karl gazed at me over the steam of his hubcap size pancake, and as if that trail of steam were the storm, he began to recite these lines --

We are lost! the captain shouted,
As he staggered down the stairs.

But his little daughter whispered,
As she took his icy hand,
"Isn't God upon the ocean,
Just the same as on the land?"

Karl didn't remember the rest of the poem as well as I remember the delicious pancake at the Roadside Store, but I will always remember the way he said the words, the way he shaped them like an actor and gave wind to the sails of the poem.

I looked it up. The poem is called Ballad of the Tempest by James T. Fields. It's an oldy, like Karl. But also like Karl, a goody. Karl asked me, later that day, if students still recited poetry in school, and I said I didn't think so. Gone, too, the oral report where you stood up before the class and talked about electrostatic generators or red efts or even the life and times of a man like Karl.

Karl told me, "I was six when the war was over."

"Which war?"

"Why, the first World War, of course," Karl said.

And then he sang that old song of WWI, "Over There".

Karl's singing is sort of like very melodious talking. Talking with a tune, but not so heavy on the tune. He really lets you hear the words. Sinatra did that. And Johnny Cash. And Karl.

That night, while staying in Karl's house nestled in the snug Konkapot valley alongside the twisty Konkapot river, deep in the ticktock heart of the old Berkshires, I heard an owl. A common barred owl, I thought. At first, it seemed to me this owl had heard Karl sing and now he was going to do his own madcap version of Ballad of the Tempest.

I don't know if Karl was awake to hear what that owl did. But I'm telling you, it was downright devilish. The creature twittered and barked and bellowed and screamed and whined and whistled -- but nary a hoot. Not one. This was an unowlish owl that sounded so much like a coyote, that next morning, I looked up barred owls in a book because I thought maybe it was a coyote and not an owl at all.

No, it was an owl. A barred owl. Just like I thought. The book, The Nightwatchers stated that these owls make many idiotic cries along with a noise than can only be described as "uh-huh, we-ay-houk". The owl's call was described as a foghorn. The author Angus Cameron also said, you might hear "...gabbles, squeals, screams, and harsh, raucous mutterings ...sounds like a battle to the death between nameless, unimaginable demons."

I asked Karl at breakfast if he'd heard the owl. "Not last night but I've heard him," he said, pointing to a fencepost in back of the kitchen. Then he looked at me, and seeing I hadn't slept a wink, said in his most melodious voice, "We are lost, the captain shouted, as he staggered down the stairs."

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