AJ and I went to the public library for the first time in a while. We used to have a library trip regularly scheduled into our week, but our schedule has been messed up since my Pittsburgh trip back in March and it has never quite recovered.

The impetus for this particular trip was AJ's desire to go fishing. My brother, who loves to fish, gave him a bamboo fishing pole a couple of years ago and took him fishing. And then last year for his birthday, a friend gave him a rod and reel, a little folding chair, and a fascinating array of lures. This is great, because our neighborhood is full of stocked trout ponds. But neither Mr. Spy nor I has the least bit of a clue how to fish. You've seen the cartoons where someone catches a tire? Or better yet, the line loops around catches several trees, a fence, an angry bull, the fisherman himself and anything but the fish? That's us.

Yesterday AJ stumbled on a wayward float that had rolled under his bed. "Can we go fishing?" We explained our reservations, how we were accident-prone and not especially likely to be helpful. As the good son of two historians, he responded, "Let's go to the library and look for a book about fishing."

And so we did. We found an array of fishing books and picked one that suited AJ's reading interests and our fishing abilities. Then he said, "Let's get a book about piranhas." So we compared several books to see which had the best pictures of piranha teeth and found a satisfactory option.

"Do piranhas live around here?"

"No, they live in the Amazon," I responded without thinking, before I remembered the warning sign on the pool bulletin board last year about how piranhas, probably dumped by a defecting pet owner, had been spotted in our river. I decided that it was probably better not to mention this to AJ. He's gotten very alarmist lately, particularly about the weather. "Are you sure that there won't be a tornado?"

When we got home, AJ and I dug for worms in the compost heap, packed up his gear, and he and Mr. Spy went fishing, the very picture of Andy Griffith and Opie heading down to the fishing hole. They didn't catch anything. When they arrived at the pond, it was being stocked, so it wasn't a lack of fish. Mr. Spy reported that as soon as they cast the line in the water, the fish would gather round, stare at the lure for a minute, then disappear in a flash of tails. They tried bait. The fish removed it from the hook. They are wily creatures. I can see AJ developing a Great White Whale complex. On our next trip to the library, we will be looking for "How to Outsmart a Fish."

6 people said it like they meant it