Eulogy, or "good words"

My cousin Brian (My Semi Colon Story) has been fighting colon cancer for nearly five years, which is a helluva lot longer than his odds were at the time of his diagnosis.

As his time grows shorter, I find myself thinking of my earliest memories of him.

When we were little kids -- 5, 6, something in that range -- at our grandmother's apartment, he took full advantage of his lofty superior age to tell me that he remembered when I was born, because there had been a horrible, terrible, many-headed dragon that had appeared, eating everything up, that turned into me.

He was more than a little full of himself then, in sharp contrast to his quieter older brother. Brian was a little pudgy then, round-faced and red-haired; pugnacious in a humorous way -- quick-witted. He was a huge pain to play any board games with, because he was (at that age) a sore loser.

His parents divorced, and my aunt married George a few years later. It was around that age that the boys stayed with us for a weekend or two.  One summer evening, we were at my grandparents' house -- my other grandparents -- and my grandfather took us down to the dock to fish. Granpa loved to fish, and it was a lovely summer evening. I don't remember how long we were fishing, because time is irrelevant when you're fishing, but eventually we understood it was time to finish. It was at this moment that Brian hooked something fierce, in our quiet, placid lake. He pulled it up onto the dock, and we stared at this creature. For the first time in my life, I looked upon an eel.

It was wriggling and swaying on the line, trying to free itself. It thrashed so wildly we couldn't get a hand on the fish to unhook it.

So, Brian took matters into his own hands.


He pounced on that eel, as if tackling his brother, and wrestled it to the dock. Boy and fish thrashed about wildly as we watched, astonished. Eventually, somehow, the eel was freed, and it slithered over the side of the dock as fast as its nonexistent legs could move it.

Brian stood up, with a huge grin on his face. He'd won. He had successfully wrestled an eel, and freed it from the hook.

The best part came next.

You see, an eel is not just a fish with a fine skin that can be made into slippery wallets and shoes. No, it is much more than that.

Eels have not just a slippery skin, but also a slippery exudate that covers the delicate skin. Recall, too, that eels swim along the bottoms of the estuaries, in close contact with what we scientists refer to as "benthic sediment" and the layman as "mud".

They have slime.

Stinky, muddy, slimy exudate. It covered him from nose to knees. He exuded the eau d'anguille about him.

It was summertime, and cars back then did not come with air conditioning. He rode in the middle, as his rightful place, between his brother and me.

He rode back to our house with a huge grin on his face, because not only  had he won a wrestling match with an eel, he reeked of it the whole way. His clothing was stiffening with drying exudate by the time it was peeled from him. I don't recall when he stopped grinning. It was a win-win for him.

Forty years later, he remembered wrestling the eel, and chuckled.

It turns out that eels have a fascinating life history. All eels, North American and European, begin in the same spot: the Sargasso Sea. Their lives span years of travel, from the salt water Sargasso, to the fresh water streams and lakes (where we met with one), and then back out to the Sargasso to mate. The next generation is born in the Sargasso, and travels apparently to the same streams its predecessors lived in. The young eels are transparent, and are named "glass eels"; as they mature into yellow and then in to silver eels, they grow quite large -- up to 5 feet long. Being born in the ocean, growing in the fresh water, and returning to the ocean to spawn makes them the only catadromous fish in North America.  Eels have been farmed and harvested for centuries, and yet their populations are drastically decreased. Someday the famous phrase "my hovercraft is full of eels*" will be just nonsense instead of amusing.

Eels can spin up to 14 rotations per second -- contrast this with Olympic ice skaters, who spin only five times per second, and you understand why we couldn't reach this eel.

In recent years, Brian's been wrestling his cancer with just as much energy as he did that eel. Only now the eel is winning. Still, every time I think of Brian, I remember that summer day when he wrestled and won. I hope that someday, some cancer patient will wrestle and win, and defeat colon cancer just as he did that eel.

For those of you who have been thinking fondly of sushi throughout this post, please -- enjoy your eel. I've never eaten it. I have never wanted to, perhaps remembering the ride home with Brian a la anguille. I must, however, point out that "when he bites on your thumb, takes a chunk of your bum, that's a moray ", because eels are everywhere.

*A very important phrase, and one that we all should commit to memory. In as many languages as possible. For example, "моє судно на повітряній подушці повно вугрів". "mon aéroglisseur est plein des anguilles". "הרחפת שלי מלאה בצלופחים". "a légpárnás tele van angolnák". "Is é mo sciorrárthach iomlán na n-eascann". "מיין כאַווערקראַפט איז פול פון ילז".