Bream fishing was a simple pleasure in the days before kids, career, and cholesterol medication. Can you go home again? Bream fishing was a simple pleasure in the days before kids, career, and cholesterol medication. Can you go home again?

Used to be, all I needed was a half day off during the full moon of May. Drag my canoe 100 yards through the woods to the Carpenter Pond in North Carolina and whack bedding bluegills until it got so dark even the wood thrushes quit singing. Have I ever been happier with a rod in my hand? Probably not. Back then, bream fishing encapsulated all that was pure and simple and right in the world. These were not fish whose shapes were embroidered on shirts with UPF ratings, not fish that you worshipped. These were fish that ate worms. Fish that you threaded onto a 49-cent stringer and released in a frying pan.

Sometimes I ask myself: What happened?

What happened was, I forgot about the bream.