When I was little, I would say maybe 6- 7 -8 years old, my father used to take me fishing with him. My brother was still too little to go, so my father would take me with him, and we’d go to different lakes and ponds in New Jersey. We’d fish for sunnies and perch and whatnot, but one weekend, he and his older brother Paul, my uncle Paul, decided to take me with them down to the Passaic River to fish for eels. We got in the car and drove all the way down Lanza Avenue down to the Passaic River, which runs between Garfield, which is where I grew up, and Passaic and Clifton, which are on the other side of the river, to the Dundee Dam.
The Dundee Dam goes across the Passaic River, there’s a waterfalls there; I think at one time it was a hydroelectric generating dam. I don’t know if it still is. Anyway, we went fishing in Dundee Lake, which is just the dammed up river up above the Dundee dam. And we went fishing for eels, and I just thought, oh well, I’ve been fishing before. No big deal, this’ll be fun, and I’m with my father so that was always fun. There were other people fishing too. We were standing on the bank of the river — now you’ve got understand back then the Passaic River was not the cleanest river in the world. I’m not sure that it is any cleaner now, but they have cleaned up a bit. There’s all kinds of manufacturing plants upriver as there was then. Anyway, most of us knew that if you caught a fish in the Passaic River you threw it back –you didn’t eat it, you didn’t take it home you didn’t eat it.
Well, I didn’t exactly know what an eel was until the first one was caught. An eel is a slimy long fish; it looks like a cross between a worm and snake. It has fins, it’s a fish and the ones we caught were probably about a foot long, a foot and a half long; I don’t remember them being any bigger than that. Luckily they hadn’t mutated from the chemicals in the water at that time; maybe they were stunted from the chemicals in the water at that time. So anyway now we were fishing for eels and of course my uncle Paul had to make sure that he dropped a couple of them on the ground; they would wiggle around and he would tell me to get it, get it Sandi before it goes back in the river or goes in the grass or whatever and I’m like eeeew!
Anyway we ended up with I guess a 5 gallon bucket full of eels. It was a nice afternoon and my father and Uncle Paul were enjoying the day and the fishing. Uncle Paul was considerably older than my father, he was maybe 14 or 15 years older. 
He had been born in Holland and then came over when the family came over. My father was the youngest one in the family. Apparently eels are Dutch thing, I don’t know, or maybe a European thing. Uncle Paul was all excited about this bucket of eels. We got done fishing I and it got to be time to go home and Uncle Paul says Roddy, that’s my father, Roddy are you gonna take some of those eels home? My father’s like oh no and I thought it was just a horrible idea but I was only a kid. Well magically a second bucket appeared and a bunch of eels got poured into the second bucket. Uncle Paul got in his car went home and I’m sure Aunt Flo was going to cook all those little rubber hoses into something, and my father put the bucket of eels in the trunk of the car and off we went to the house and I couldn’t believe he was going to bring those things home to my mother.
Now my mother was not averse to cleaning fish; she and my father had spent their honeymoon at Lake Winnipesaukee and went fishing. She was not averse to cleaning fish, she had cleaned many fish, cooked many fish. Well she wasn’t real thrilled about those eels. My father brought the bucket of eels up into the kitchen and my mother took one look at this squirming bunch of like black rubber fire hoses and sent him back outside. We lived upstairs so he had to go all the way back downstairs. I don’t ultimately know what he did with the eels. I don’t know if he just dumped them out into the vacant lot next to our house, I don’t know if he put them to a mercifully merciful death by hitting them over the head with a stick or something like that. I really don’t know what happened to those eels. I never wanted to see eels again.
The reason I’m even talking about eels—I can’t believe I’m talking about eels– is this: Mike and I were watching a movie last night called “Frenzy”. It’s an Alfred Hitchcock movie, a really good movie, and in the movie the wife of the chief detective who’s working on a murder case is taking some fancy course in continental cooking and she’s serving him all these exotic dishes. The first one that appears in the movie is what she calls fish stew. It’s freaking eels. It’s eels and they have their heads on and they’re looking at –they’re not alive of course—but they’re looking at the man and he pokes at them. She goes back to the kitchen to bring out the next course, God forbid, and he says, darling what exactly is in this stew? And she says oh it’s eel and she rattles off the names of a couple other strange fish that I’ve never heard of either and neither had he, and he just kept poking them under, under the soup, and finally while her back was turned, he picked the eel up and threw it back in the soup tureen. I’m so glad my mother did not cook those eels. I can’t imagine what they would have been like. I’ll never forget my eel fishing experience.