Big Fish

nowles, a Dr. Millhauser, a Dr. Vin­cetti. Each was a specialist famous in his field. Each kept an eye on that part of my father that was his specialty, and reported his findings to Dr. Bennett, our old family doctor, who, as captain of the team, was a generalist. He synthesized the details of their ongoing reports, filled in whatever blanks they may have left out, whereupon he would give us the Big Picture. He sometimes flattered us by using the words he had gone to school to learn: renal failure, for instance, and chronic hemolytic anemia. This last, this anemia, he described as being particularly debilitating, as the body retained excessive amounts of iron, creating a need for periodic blood transfusions, an inability to assimilate

Birds perched on his shoulder as he helped his own father in the field

The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.

He arrived there of an evening, tired and hungry, and found a room in the home of an old woman who took in borders.

It’s here he came one day, and as he was drifting off into a dream woke to see a beautiful young woman bathing in the river.

ast people said, Remember that rolling river?
Looking west, Remember Talbert’s Pond?
The day he was born began as just another day. The sun rose, peered down on the little wooden house where a wife, her belly as

“I’d say I’d missed you,” I say, “if I knew what I was missing.”

“Fine then,” Wiley says. “I won’t bring up that patch of ground with the shack on it between where the road stops and the lake starts that just might be hard to find by foot or car or to see from the air, and just might not be on any map, or how whoever owns it has a piece of paper you’ve never seen to sign, Mr. Bloom. Because you and Al have all the truth with you over there. Don’t know what I’m talking about, I guess. My apologies to you who knows better.”

A big fish in a big pond—that’s what I wanted.

Yeah,” I say. “You are hereby and forever after my fa­ther, Edward Bloom, a Very Great Man. So help you Fred.”