Shem Creek (Continued)

I used to come down here all the time, in between deals, and I guess I've been fishing the waters around Charleston for fifteen years. There isn't a creek in this whole area that hasn't seen the bottom of my boat, but that said, every time I dropped a hook in the salty creeks and rivets, it always seemed like the first time. The landscape and the light - well, it was always a little different. Quiet but vibrant. You could have made yourself believe that the good Lord Himself was somewhere in the thicket, waiting patiently for you to remember that He was still there. It finally got to the point where I just left my boat in South Carolina.

And my heart? Well, looking back, it seems now that the only time I ever thought about it was when I was floating on the Lowcountry waters.

We should discuss this heaven and hell thing, which all begins with my newly-acquired-at-great-personal-loss philosophy. Here it is in a nutshell. When you choose the wrong partner at the dance (whether it's marriage or profession), you will surely bust you ass.

Women seem to know this by instinct. Men don't. Men are conditioned from birth to be providers and basically, our success is measured by how well we do that job. This somehow neatly translates to how much we earn and how many trophies we can accumulate over a lifetime. Cars, second houses, antiques, jewelry for the wife... this list goes on and on. We have to graduate from the rights schools, become a partner in the right firm, marry the right girl, be invited to join the right club and develop a decent game of golf and tennis.