"I Want a Big Fish"
                                                                                                                   Detail from
                                                                                                                   The Outdoor Primer
                                                                                                                    by Eulalie Osgood Grover
                                                                                                                    Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co, 1904
The Fish's Reply:

"I see a boy.
He is fishing.
He wants to catch me.
I know he does.
He is giving me a worm.
He wants me to eat the worm.
I am not hungry, little boy.
I have had my breakfast.
I don't want your worm."

Nevermind whether you could learn to read from this; I think it safe to say children in 1904 read no worse than they do now and probably more of them could name the presidents of the United States and all the state capitals and recite a Longfellow poem or two but I digress.  

What intrigues me, beyond the strange image, is the poetry of it all.  It's like Twitter.  It's Facebook updates from the friend whose updates you've been meaning to hide but can't quite bring yourself to because of their perverse or unsettling or maddeningly oblique nature.  You think there must be more to it all than you're seeing, that it must all have more meaning than it seems to have.  You think it must be hinting at something more at any rate.  Otherwise it's simply too pointless to contemplate, if you see my point.  I mean, we aren't learning to read after all.  One hopes.

A friend of mine, (a real one, as opposed to one on Facebook which could be the same thing of course but not always), works with celebrities and no, I can't say who and I won't say what he does except that he provides an important service and is not only extremely talented but also very professional and discreet about it.  You can trust him not to kiss and tell as they say.  In any case we were chatting and he said, "Guess where we were," meaning his famous client and himself, and then without waiting for me to reply he said, "Having a massage!"  With this he burst into giggling, being the sort of person who can burst into giggling without taking it to full-on guffaws, being as I think I made clear a person of more than a little restraint and self control, not to mention stamina which is important in what he does.  Energizer bunny and all that, if you know what I mean.

To his news of visiting an exclusive spa, I could only say that I'd been under the impression he'd been working at the time, to which he replied brightly that he had been working.  That was the funny part.  It was the client's personal assistant who'd had the massage.  By way of response I'm afraid I could only look confused.

"The assistant Twitters," my friend explains.  "He Twitters as his boss."  

"I get a effing assistant to be me," my friend quoted his celebrity client saying.  "And I effing pay the effing twit to effing be me and get a effing massage and effing Twitter about it.  Can you effing believe it?  Is that a effing great job or what?"

I admit my first reaction was to wonder whether this celebrity might not find The Outdoor Primer a helpful vocabulary building tool.  I also  confess to having serious reservations about this particular celebrity's ability to name more than one or two presidents of the United States, if that.  As for any of the state capitals or Longfellow, as you might imagine I could only despair.  But I digress.  

What I was tempted to ask my friend was why anyone would bother with such an elaborate ruse.  What was the point of having someone impersonate you in order to report on having experiences you weren't even having, while in fact you were at the same time busily occupied elsewhere?  It seemed faintly illicit somehow, not to mention unnecessarily duplicitous.  Was that the point of being a celebrity?  Duplicity?  It didn't seem like enough, somehow.

But I resisted the impulse to broach the subject.  After all, who am I to question the ways of the very famous, and in any case, what was the point of asking?  To satisfy some curiosity and bring reason to the matter?  Really? 

And in the larger scheme of things, what was the point to any of it?  We fish for compliments, we fish for information, for secrets, for some attention, inappropriate or otherwise, we fish for the truth.  We fish for meaning.  

We fish for the point.  Along with everything else.