I grew up hating fish. I hated the smell, the taste, the idea. I hated how they baked on the always burnt, not quite washed, cookie sheet my mom pulled out from underneath the stove. I, or one of my brothers, were responsible for washing it when last my mom made brownies so the corners still had forever hardened batter stuck along the edges.

The problem is that cookie sheets are too big and brownies are too much of a novelty to ever retain that fervor and desire for chocolate goodness for more than three-fourths of the tray. Therefore the leftover, depending on the amount of sleepovers that occurred during the brownies existence, would end up lasting an extra five days past the point of their life expectancy. Like a poor old man stuck in a nursing home for years, each month losing one more basic function.

“I heard Mr. Lester lost the ability to blink yesterday.”

“Yep, Sally has to lubricate his eyes every three minutes now.”

“On the bright side, there are leftover brownies from his 97th birthday in the rec room.”

“Yeah but they’re all hard and stale now.”

And so the cookie sheets in my house forever had some sort of “burnt to” food attached. Even now, the cookie sheet underneath my oven has everlasting rust formed on it from years of poor washing. I feel Pam Spray is one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated over the American public.

Now you, the reader, might be wondering what a cookie sheet has to do with fish. To which I’d say, you must not have grown up Catholic. You see, as a Catholic, I was forced—though I shouldn’t say forced—to refrain from eating meat, other than fish it seems, on Fridays during the mystical time of Lent. I also wasn’t able to eat candy as a way to relate to the hardships Jesus had to face during his 40 days in the desert, though I highly doubt Jesus was able to supplement his sugar intake with Tang.

So every Friday from age one until I graduated high school and ate grilled cheese or tuna fish sandwiches for the better part of four years in college, Lent or not, I ate what can only be described as “fish sticks”.

The box, which donned a bearded Atlantic fisherman circa 1927 in full wet weather gear and winking, sat in the basement freezer all year long. My father bought the economy sized box from BJ’s or Cost Plus or Sam’s Club, depending on the year, and stored it below the fifteen loaves of frozen bread, thirty pounds of frozen ground beef, twenty pounds of frozen pork chops, and a five gallon jug of vanilla swirl ice cream. The “swirl,” as I understood it, was a mixture of leftover chocolate syrup and caramel from recycled Hershey Jugs but at no point in my childhood did I ever eat ice cream without freezer burn so I didn’t notice. It wasn’t until a field trip to Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts that I learned ice cream actually had flavors besides “cold dairy.”

So Captain Abraham sat in the dark of the storage freezer as if at the bottom of the ocean, until the week leading up to Ash Wednesday when he would emerge in all his yellow glory, and sit atop the hedonistic beef and pork products for a month.

On the first day of Lent, my family and I, if my father didn’t treat us to a fish buffet feast in our ash crossed foreheads, labeling us as saps to the marketing genius of the Shoney’s corporation, we celebrated at home with what the daring captain mockingly called, cod fillets.

Each cod fillet measured roughly five inches long by two inches wide and about an inch thick, though when first pulled at from the heap they seemed much bigger. This was not because of some chemical reaction to oxygen but because five to six were frozen together until broken apart with an ice pick.

If I were lucky enough to get out of any of the food preparation I would lie to myself in the hope that my mom had forgotten it was Friday and that ever so distinct smell, which crept upstairs to my room, was just a ghost memory, like a man whose lost a limb. Sadly, the bottle of McCormick’s tartar sauce on the kitchen table would bitch slap me back into reality.

And there they were—twelve golden bricks of penance all laid out on a pan ruined by decadence, sloth, and laziness. It was as if our sins were being purged and forgiven by the holy water like attributes of the fish stick oil.

This was fish. This was all that was fish. Nothing else, to me, was fish. Each terrible bite of each terrible stick was fish. I couldn’t imagine a more intense penance and I lost all respect for past martyrs and saints. Sebastian and his arrows and Lucy and her eyes meant nothing to me because they were never forced to consume this abomination of sustenance approved by the FDA.

I think my mom knew how bad they were too for she never seemed to cook side dishes on those fateful, fish stick Fridays. The table was bleak and empty and cold because my mom new what we were all up against and didn’t want to beat around the bush—didn’t want to doll up a dud. She wanted us to stare right into Satan’s eyes and cover them in tartar sauce. And no matter how much my dad acted or how much tartar sauce he caked on we all knew he was struggling too. Though he probably wasn’t cursing the celebrities of our Church’s foundation as I was, he most certainly was cursing Captain Abraham.

My mother argues that she made other dishes on Friday but there’s no documented proof to back her claims—no receipts or tax write offs for religious causes. In her defense, I do recall her making spaghetti with scallops once but that had me sounding off the pleasures and platitudes of Capt. A’s cod fillets. And that’s not to say my mother isn’t a good cook, she’s a great cook, but we were all raised on meat and potatoes and fish was just too damn expensive when you’re spending a week’s worth of each month’s income on milk alone.

Fish was so rare in my childhood that I didn’t think anyone actually ate the fish in display cases at the market. Whole fish on ice were like props from a movie, bashed through during a car chase scene on a San Francisco wharf—as insane as chickens hanging in Chinatown, outlandish as my Korean friend Sang Jeoung eating squid on the bus for breakfast. And it wasn’t until I took a sailing trip to the Bahamas after I graduated college that I realized fish wasn’t just food for the rich and Asian, but a middle class Irish boy like myself could indulge as well.

Even now, no mater the amount of grouper sandwiches or fish tacos I eat, I still have a hard time blocking out those Friday night culinary memories. When I order fish and chips it’s not because of a craving but healing. So with every bite of grilled salmon I see myself standing before a kitchen sink in Monroe, Connecticut—the failed fragrance of resistance, acceptance, and forgiveness in the air. And I’m once again washing a sink full of dishes. I’m scrubbing away the greasy fish stick outlines from the cookie sheet and leaving behind a tattooed trace of the hardened brownie corners as if to forgive the pan of its latest produce and remind it to never give up hope, there are only a couple Friday’s left.

© 2008 Tyke Johnson