Long before I was stricken with the desire to own my first BB gun, I pined for a Zebco 33 -- having, in my own mind, outgrown the lesser and finicky 202s that the rest of the kids owned. When my wish was finally granted, I also wanted to go after bigger fish.

But a stern warning from my mother, issued when I landed an 8-inch-long mudcat, sort of squashed that impulse.

"Don't touch it," she admonished. "It'll sting you!"

It was not unlike the repeated warnings I got when I tore the wrappings off that first Daisy air rifle: Be careful -- you'll shoot your eye out!

This was, of course, almost two decades before the 1983 film, A Christmas Story, gave voice to the oft-heard phrase. In the now-classic flick, poor bespectacled Ralphie heard the joy-killing words whenever he asked parents, teachers or even Santa for a Red Ryder BB gun.

I lived in fear of catfish for at least another year. Since nobody explained that it was their fins that could inflict pain, I imagined their whiskers dripping with venom. Certain death would follow their touch.

Finally wise to the perils of handling catfish and armed with a gleaming new Zebco 33, I at last set out. But rather than target catfish, I aimed to terrorize all the bream within casting distance. The following spring, I found I could actually reach the far side of the slough, and discovered the joy of a bream bed. And it was a bream, not a BB gun, that shot my eye out. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

I had caught my share of bream up to that point -- little pretty ones not much bigger than my child-sized hand -- but it wasn't until I fished a "bream bed" such as those I'd heard grownups talk about that I hooked into one big enough to fry.

"Throw it next to those weeds," my father told me one day. "There's a bream bed there. I can smell it."

I had the devil of a time understanding how anyone could smell a bed. In my mind, someone must've tossed an old mattress or box springs into the water there. Try as I might, I couldn't smell anything.

"Who put it there?" I asked.

"Who put what where?" Daddy responded.

"The bed. Who dumped it in the water?"

"Nobody," he replied. "Just throw your line over there."