One of my maternal uncles and his wife recently moved into a
new house nearby and, not too long ago, some of us went over to check it out and say
welcome to the neighborhood. The previous owners had left quite a few things
behind, and as we got the grand tour, one of the items we all stopped to have
a conversation about was a mobile hanging on the ceiling in one of the rooms. Its
theme seemed to be “marine life,” and the sight of several pufferfish dangling
from the piece sparked a memory for my uncle (and several jokes about not
eating fugu fish from the rest of us!).
For a time in his teenage years, my uncle lived with his
paternal grandmother, my great-grandmother Katherine (Shepherd) Sharpe, in the
Bronx in New York City.
One of the ways they passed time together was to go fishing, and he remembers on several
occasions accidentally catching pufferfish.
