The Missing Catfish

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are surrounded by symbols.

I took a trip to Oklahoma the weekend before Thanksgiving to visit my brother and have a meal with him at the Catfish Roundup which is a few miles north of Seminole on US377, just south of its intersection  with I-40.  It’s at a crossroads: In a certain way of thinking that means it’s at a boundary between worlds.

We got on I-44 at the Downstream Casino and drove from there through Tulsa and exited on to 377 at Stroud, where we passed another Casino just south of town.

Oklahoma is a different place now than the one I grew up in.  

Along I-44 we passed by all sorts of billboards that would’ve been so mysterious to me 40 years ago.  There are the billboards for the marijuana dispensaries with the big, green branch on them.  Sometimes the leaves are stylized and abstract; sometimes they are more realistic. They are located at strategic places along the interstate.  Along with these, there are the billboards that advertise treatment for addiction.

It makes money for the growers, for the sellers, for the billboard folks, and for the people who treat addiction. 

What a boon. 

This being Oklahoma, there are crosses everywhere.

Not everything has changed over the last 40 years.

The churches are there. The churches remain. The churches have been joined by others. I almost said, “their enemies” instead of “others.”  But I don’t know if that works.  It could be “competition;” it could be "symbiote."  I’ll let the reader choose among these and whatever others they’d like to throw in. 

It’s bigger than me.

But, to continue, we got off I-44 at Stroud, went past the Sac and Fox Casino just south of there; then past St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church and the Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague, there in Prague, Oklahoma.  (Everywhere else in the world it’s PrAHge. In Oklahoma, it’s PrAYgue.)  Then across I-40, and the Catfish Roundup is right there to the left, catty-corner across from a Seminole Casino.

My brother was already there.

The Catfish Roundup has a tall sign out front with a picture of the eponymous catfish on it, breaching the water.  I’ve never personally seen a catfish breach the water.  They are bottom feeders, so I don’t know if they do. But what can you say: It’s art.

To match the catfish on the sign, there is a catfish in an aquarium on the inside. At least there used to be.  The aquarium is still there, but there is no big catfish in it.  There is a small, scavenger catfish that cleans the glass; there are a few smaller game fish that are native to Oklahoma; but in the place where the big catfish that was their mascot, there is just emptiness. 

It’s gone.

After I’d ordered my chicken fried steak with pinto beans as a substitute for salad, I asked my brother who is more up on the local news about it.

“They don’t like to talk about it,” he said.

With the catfish gone but the aquarium still there, I was reminded of a line in “A Christmas Carol,” where in the shadows of the future, the Ghost of Christmas Present sees Tiny Tim’s carefully preserved crutch leaning in the corner.

That somber news was still in the air when two black couples of middle-age walked into the restaurant.  They were dressed up.  One of the men had a crisply-pressed suit and tie on.  Somewhat in contrast to that was a baseball cap on his head that read “John 3:16.”

They took the table beside ours, but, before they sat down, the man in the hat greeted us and praised the Lord to us.

We  praised the Lord back, because that is what one does.

To quote John Wesley, “My heart was strangely warmed.”

There was a construction crew lunching at yet another table--a mixed group of men, black, white, hispanic, and native. The black man in the crew came over and greeted the man in the cap warmly as the crew was on the way out.

The food came.  The chicken fried steak with fries and pinto beans did nothing to diminish the warmth of the Holy Spirit.

My heart was practically on fire by the time we left and turned back toward Kansas, back past the casinos, back past the dispensaries, back toward home.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.