The boy and his dad. It’s sweet, really. The boy isn’t so much a boy as he is a man, old enough to be one anyway. He’s playing catch with his dad. He’s not really good at throwing the football, but who cares? The dad isn’t either, with his salted and peppered hair and his sweater. The son has a rugby sweater on, one that no one wears when playing rugby but one that I was always told was a rugby sweater. It’s striped, like they’re trying to make the son look younger than his apparent 35 years. They do that on television a lot, the making people look younger, even when they don’t have to. The football is wobbly in each direction, but they are having a lot of fun. Laughing out loud, fun. They’re wearing jeans.
There are some leaves on the ground, but not piles of them. Those spirals haven’t gotten any tighter. The drug the dad is on is fine, I guess. He’s now at risk for lymphatic seizure, spontaneous digit separation, and he’s very likely going to need a kidney transplant someday soon, but that itching he had on his right ear is gone, so he figures things are looking up. There are risks and rewards, son, and these are the risks for that reward. I think he’s talking about his itchy ear, but I can’t be sure. It’s TV, after all, and no one is particularly sure of anything anymore.
Later, another son and his dad. This time, both are older. They’re fishing, with fly fishing rods. They pull up to the stream side, and they’re laughing and pointing. Pointing and laughing. The dad isn’t well, but he’s happy anyway. See, when he wakes up his left eye no longer tears for a few seconds. Sure he has to contend with complete, catastrophic vision loss, right ear deafness, and he can no longer speak when it rains, but if you’ve ever had a teary left eye upon waking, you know he’s better off now. They amble towards the bank, rods rigged, self-assured smiles galore, sweatshirts over their collars, under their fishing vests.
The stream is swift, but not swift enough to hold many trout. The rod is the fly variety, which is why the red and white bobber that they clipped on makes very little sense. The trees are turning, just a slight bit. They aren’t brown and red, but they aren’t early-summer-green, either. The shoreline is trampled a bit, and it looks like a park of some variety, with regular mowing and trimming. Waders on, flies stuck to their hats, huge grins plastered to their faces, they’re now ready to fish. They fling the bobbered line into the water, as if casting spinning rods to bass. This is all wrong, but the joy that it’s bringing is worth every production error.
The fish they catch is huge! It is. It’s massive. It’s a trout, all right, likely one that fell victim to the bobbered night crawler that was cast with a fly rod in spinning rod style. They net it. The smiles! And that, son, is how you do it. The water moves swiftly by without much concern for the fishermen or their quarry. They’re going to eat that fish. I’d let it go, but they’re going to eat it. Sure the dad, who must be 75, is going to have to blend the fish before drinking it, because Prolavatixam might dry that morning eye up but it has a tendency to cause jaw failure. Still, smiles and sweaters and liquified fish for dinner. There’s little that can compare.
Commercials don’t teach us much, except when they do. When it’s fall, and the weather is perfect, even television people enjoy the outdoors. It’s fall-like right now, even if it isn’t meteorlogical fall, so let’s be like those people on TV and get outside. Oh, and the other thing they’re rarely doing is walking in cities. Get thee to the lake and wear a sweater, because if you’ve taken Spolaxivizatons with any frequency, your life may depend on it.