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There is No Water in the Santa Cruz River, Anyway

Well, of course we went to our son's wedding, and reclaimed our table and resumed our  debates at the Coffee Shop, and cozied up to our friends and relatives.  We bumped into people, and we remarked how nothing had changed and everything had.  We admired how the graduates of Lake Mills High School, class of 1964, were handsome and even more fun than the last time, but we did not forget our roots.  While in Minneapolis, we went to Engebretson's so I could buy Norwegian fish balls.

Engebretson's Scandinavian Refugee Pantry does not take credit cards, you know, so I went to the bank up Lake Street to cash in my IRA so I could buy fish balls.  What good is it to go into retirement with even a most modest retirement plan if your soul shrivels for lack of fish balls?

Perhaps I ought to be quick here to say that fish balls are not part of a fish; not an identifiable zone.  They are scarcely identifiable, at all.  About the size of cocktail meat balls, they sport the graying color of what one might guess a thoroughly pulverized fish might look like if it had been run through a food processor and dabbed back into little balls.  Fish balls do have a special flavor, because nothing else tastes quite like fish balls; not even fish.  Nobody eats fish balls because they carry the subtle essence of the sea, or convey something only the genes can grasp.  People eat fish balls for only two reasons:  first, because they can be stored in tins for years until the next plague or pestilence reduces one to eating gray things or, second, because when the Scandinavians shipped emigrants and fish balls to the New World, they did not send their brightest and best.  They sent Squareheads and fish balls.  So I like fish balls.

I have six cans of fish balls.  No, actually I opened one can almost immediately upon arriving in Tucson.  It might very well be the first can of Norwegian fish balls ever in Tucson.  If a man without god is like a fish without a bicycle, then I am like a haboob without fish balls.

Scorn will have no effect.  I am beyond that.  They do not have a harsh taste, or even a fishy taste.  They are gray.  They are the reason Norwegians feel compelled to wear bright sweaters, and drill for oil.  They lack the color and the allure that might make them good bait, and they will not hold on a hook, anyway.  That I like fish balls helps to explain something about me; a lot about me.  But, at the same time, and for the same reasons, I cannot explain it intelligently.

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