In the outdoor cathedral, what fills the stringer can also feed the soul
 
By Larry Bozka

Apparently, at Harvard Medical School they taught Michael Monmouth more than merely how to reassemble broken hips. Somewhere down the line, someone taught him compassion.

"Doc," I said as a pair of young interns wearing drab green scrubs wheeled me into the operating room at Clear Lake Regional Medical Center, "I've got a fishing trip planned to the Chandeleur Islands with my family in mid-July. Any chance I'll be healed up enough by then to go?"

The soft-spoken surgeon smiled reassuringly. "We'll see."

Five minutes later, the anesthesiologist did his thing and I went under like an anchor. Monmouth and his team went to work putting my fractured femur bone back into one piece with a metal plate, sharp-pointed screws and a long, threaded pin that was used to reattach the ball that rests inside the hip socket.

I'd love to tell you I broke it while going mano-a-mano with a 500-pound blue marlin from the rolling cockpit of Capt. Rick Rule's Luhrs 290. Or, at the very least, that I fell out of a deer stand while making repairs to door hinges. Anything but slipping on a plastic floor mat and smacking like a dropped sack of feed onto a hard tile floor while, of all things, walking out of an oil change shop.

But that's the way it happened, and now I have to live with it. Monmouth tells me that I'll know when this winter's cold fronts are on the way well before the weatherman puts out the word.

The surgery lasted around four hours. And when I came to in my room in a morphine-induced haze, surrounded by a host of family and friends, something told me that the Chandeleur trip was definitely off. So was the long-awaited billfishing trip with my old buddy Capt. Rule, the bass excursion to Lake Guerrero with wife Mary and the cobia quest out of Tom Holliday's Cocodrie Charters with compadres Mark Davis of Shakespeare and Bruce Stanton of PRADCO.

Nope, summer '98 was a goner. I went home with a walker, some ice packs and a sizable stash of pain pills and muscle relaxers, and hit the couch. Mary turned the living room into an office of sorts, with the fax machine, phone, tape transcriber and laptop computer resting on a brand-new storage shelf that my friend Jesse Simpkins of Plano Molding sent over along with a get-well card and a new Steve Earle CD. My long-time artist buddy Mark Mantell, who lent me the walker and promised me I could take a sledgehammer to the thing once I was through with it, dropped by now and then to show me some new paintings, go through my slide files with me and, in general, help keep my mind off of all the fishing I was missing.

I got lots of cards and lots of calls, some of the latter which I still don't remember due to the bizarre effect that Percocet tends to have on one's sense of recall. Rule, thoughtful guy that he is, called to tell me that if I was going to break my hip I at least picked the right time to do it. The Una Mas, due to relentless winds in June and July, spent most of her days resting in her slip at Bridge Harbor Marina instead of trolling the high seas. My fishing buddy Louis Russo and his co-worker Victoria Kearns at Wrangler Rugged Wear sent over a bottle of high-grade, 10-year-old Evan Williams sipping whiskey with a card that read something like "Next time you fall and break a bone, we at least want you to have a good reason for it."

God, I love friends like that.

I also got a card from the wife of an associate who, with all due respect and sympathy, informed me that she had instructed her husband to steer clear of me forevermore due to my incessant propensity for disaster. Given my less-than-sterling track record, I can't say as I blame her.

I make Murphy look bulletproof. For example:

I broke both bones in my right arm back in the third grade after taking a fall at the local skating rink. I've had torn rotator cuffs repaired on both shoulders, but thanks to the remarkable skills of orthopedic surgeon David Lionberger-another friend with whom I was supposed to fish this summer before the bizarre accident relegated me to the living room-I can now whip a fly rod with the best of 'em. I also endured one of the worst cases of hepatitis A on record at Methodist Hospital in Houston after ingesting a bad oyster at a Houston seafood restaurant in March of 1990. Dr. Larry Foote saw me through that one, and I still owe him a fishing trip.

And that, my friend, is just for starters.