The old man went to sea to kill the whale named Moby. He sailed the hostile waters with vengeance, mixed with respect for the power and cunning of the beast that had taken his leg.

And there was the other old man and the tuna that spoiled in the sun and water, and was nibbled by shark on the long arduous journey home, so he couldn't even prove he had made his catch. He also had a respect for the sea and the life it contained, but had been outdone by the thrill of the kill and the greed of the deed.

I sailed the sea to Europe, and I had a respect for the distance, the utmost immensity of it, while going out to stand on the deck the first two or three days. The salt would spray up from the bow, driven by the wind, making the skin of the face feel cold and tight under skies that were the kind that came with thunderstorms or blizzards. No sun for days.

I had respect for life, and had been vegetarian years before. The Vietnam War had ended and I had gone back to eating meat again, after the vigil I kept as part of my conscientious objection. My reverence for life had been based on the teachings of Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer.

Big city life. What a way to learn about how others live! And in Chicago it offered the chance to observe how other cultures blend into American society, while keeping their rituals. Like the elderly Chinese couple who would often ride the same bus north on Sheridan Road, when I was coming home from work. The man would stand up, go to the front of the bus, where the change hopper was, and when the bus stopped, he'd turn to look at his wife. She'd get up and walk to the front as he went down the steps. They then walked down the street about 8 feet apart. A remnant of the time when the man went through the jungle or forest or rocks, clearing the way to make it safe for the woman.

Apartment life offered the chance to meet a lot of interesting people at closer range.

For about two years I had Korean neighbors above me. They had a little girl who wore leather shoes with stiff bottoms. For days on end, she would wear them, at about five in the morning, and would run relay races with herself back and forth in the long parquet floor hallway. New shoes, the enjoyment of clomping around in them. A day or two, sure, but it became a morning ritual, like shaving, eating breakfast or taking a shower.

It was like a city rooster crowing through an electric megaphone, conveyed downstairs through the walls in triumphant clatter clip clops, like the bird with the large red comb was strutting across my supine form on the water bed, its talons tendrilling though my ears and spinal nerves, threatening to break through the plastic mattress and send me floating downstairs like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

When you work till after midnight, ride the bus home, stay up late... Well, that was exactly what I wanted to wake up to! I arose many mornings as if gale force winds had shaken me out of my hammock, running up the steps to the deck above to silence the bandy legged bird.

The Koreans had other strange customs, like washing clothes in the kitchen, and hanging them to dry. Drip dry. On one occasion the downstair's neighbor came up to talk with me, when she had water dripping off the light bulb in her dining room ceiling. Upstairs ropes were strung through the room and the floor was soaked with water, chasing the cock a doodle doo down from the third floor, behind the plaster walls.

Somehow when they got off the boat and carried their things up the stairs, it must not have registered that they were no longer living on the "ground" level.

When I wasn't shouting at the rooster about its big bird shoes thudding over my carcass, I was civil. They probably wondered if all Americans wake up shouting, "QUIET! STOP IT!"... I guess they considered me a very strange tenant, as well.

One day the man said he had a fish for me that he'd caught in Lake Michigan. Now I'm not much of a fisherman, and hadn't cleaned one since I was in grade school, and that was mostly watching. I like mine wrapped in plastic without any intestines and other stuff.

I went into the apartment upstairs to see what he had and he led me to the bathroom. He had three of them, and he gave me one of the large ones. It was over two feet long and was a little hard to grab as it swam around in several inches of water, with a piece of rope through its gill.

Luckier than the old man, I managed to carry its flopping flapping form down one flight, while I listened to its last request... "Please, please, let me have just one more swim around the pool before we go to dinner."

I put it in my bathtub and turned the water on, watching as it was lifted off its side, buoyed up by the currents, till it could finally breathe again. I decided to let it go a few laps, while I got up the nerve to eat it.

I wasn't used to eating live food. It used to be against my religion to eat food that had been alive, like, with feet, or wings, or fins... Schweitzer had eaten monkey meat in the jungle during World War II. Said it was tough and not tasty. Gandhi wouldn't eat beef. But Jesus ate fish.

I called my friend, Larry, to invite him for dinner.

I said that we'd be grilling fish, and we settled down to some wine and smoked the pipe. When I introduced him to dinner, he couldn't believe that I was serious. An alternative was raised, but it would've meant carrying a flailing fish about 3 blocks down the street and through the park, to try to get it back to the lake before it suffocated.

Nope. We were going to be primitive and kill the food we ate. I wish I could say that the rest of the story was as pleasant or successful as the foregoing. But seafaring men we were to be, and the carp was our evening meal.

Okay, this fish was large. The largest I had ever touched, and the head and neck were a lot more solid than I could've imagined. It took several blows with a hammer to get it to stop swimming. That was bad enough, but only the beginning.

If you have never gone fishing or hunting, or if you are squeamish, please go read another story.

I had a lightweight cleaver from Thailand, that I used for chopping Oriental vegetables. You know, the squarish blade that you picture a butcher swinging. Somehow I thought that a tap or two and I'd have it's head off. But this wasn't a celery stalk or bok choy that I was slicing. This was more like a Mobius Carpus.

That was when I realized that this was going to be a lot more disgusting than I could've imagined. Having once forsaken meat, believing that all life is sacred, it was ludicrous to see myself trying to chop and see-saw that silver blade through cervical vertebrae that would've been fitting on an armadillo or Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I held the blade across the back of its neck and began banging it down with a foot long piece of four by four, gradually forcing the blade to sever the head. Larry was crouched behind me, watching intently, and neither of us could believe how tough this old fish was, or that I was actually doing what I was doing. There was a challenge seasoned with the crudity of the scene.

Finally, the blade slid in between the bony chunks and the entire fish flipped up in the tub, flapping its tail several inches above the bottom of the bathtub in an attempt to flee.

"IT'S ALIVE!"... Like a character in a horror film, suddenly confronted by a demon that had just been riddled with bullets and aerosoled by a nuclear bomb, still standing erect like a Terminator. I jumped backwards into Larry, rolling both of us out through the bathroom door into the hallway... "How can it be ALIVE?"

Once we recovered our feet and from our laughter, we crawled back to the edge of the tub and he said, "It was just a spinal reflex."

"Hell of a reflex."... I poked it gently, to see if it was going to leap up and bite me.

The worst part of the ordeal accomplished, I gutted it and scraped the scales off, till there remained a gigantic fish fillet.

Once again, I'm no fisherman. I'd been cooking burgers and roasts that summer on a small Smokey Joe. I was used to laying the meat on the grill and letting it cook for a while before turning it.

The coals were burning well in the time it took to slaughter and skewer the poor carp. So I lay the flesh across the grill and we left it to cook. When we came back out, it had all but disappeared. The gruesome dinner had somehow slid down through the wires. Most of it was nestled on the coals, with some very fishy tidbits still up above.

It felt like a waste. The only good thing remaining of that fish's life is our memories and now this story. I offer my apologies to the carp, for not returning it to the sea.

To those wise hunters who believe you should only kill what you need to eat, a simple reminder... If you don't know how to cook it, let it go!