Fishing

› PHNOM PENH, 2021...............................

I caught my first fish in Key West when I was three years old. We were getting ready to move from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Orangeburg, South Carolina, where the Ethyl Corporation, for whom my father did research and development, had purchased a chemical plant where he could expand and manage their experiments. Both of my parents were intellectuals, and it was a difficult move for my mother, who had been living in college towns and Washington, DC, since she had married ten years earlier. She had a nine-year-old, a six-year-old, and a three-year-old. She would be leaving easy access to the decadent, sophisticated city of New Orleans, whose population was nearly half that of the state of South Carolina at the time. Where would they buy wine?