I wouldn't take a Million Dollars!
I'm the luckiest Man Alive!
"Well, sir, I have to agree with them. I do have it made. I'd be fibbing if I tried to deny it."
I'm doing exactly what I always wanted to do: fish and gallivant.
And I've been doing it most of my life.
I hung out the "Gone Fishing" sign almost sixty-five years ago and have been gone just about ever since.
You can believe me or not, but over the last fifty-five years, I can't remember ever having spent thirty consecutive nights under one roof.
I've had the hankering to roam since I could walk; to fish since I was seven.
Except for a few remote childhood fancies, I've never really wanted to do anything else. And so I haven't done anything else. It's a simple and confounded as that.
Of course I didn't set out to be on television or anything like that when I was a kid. Heck, I was invented long before TV was--or even radio. What I mean is that I loved fishing from the first time I put a line in the water, and it wasn't long after that I made up my mind that I was going to make a living out of it somehow someday.
I could have gone into other things over the years. But I never could pry myself away. Actually I was beyond temptation. I'm lazy by nature and was having too much fun-- and still am.
And my wandering fit in with the fishing perfectly. In all my travels, I never knew what I was looking for. I still can't explain it today. All I know is that it was something that I had to do. I had to keep on the move like a man one step ahead of a sheriff.
If you offered me $1,000,000. on the barrelhead, I couldn't name you all the places I've lived. I mean it. I've maintained a home in Florida over the years. But I never spent more than a few days a year there. I'm too busy traveling -- anywhere, everywhere.
Between roaming and fishing, there aren't many bodies of water I've missed from coast to coast. I have fished in every state except Hawaii in this great country of ours--and in a couple territories outside our borders.
I've been lucky--tremendously lucky. Just the fact I've managed to live through seventy years and still feel as frisky as a pinto pony is proof enough of that.
It's been a wonderful, wonderful life--even in the days when I didn't have any more than a nickel in my pocket.
Wonderful? Mister, it's been the darndest life any three men together could ever have.
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