Loading...
 
TFA: A Half-Sunday Homage to a Whole Leonardo da Vinci
Print
English
Flash player not available.


Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability.
If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player(external link)

A Half-Sunday Homage to a Whole Leonardo da Vinci

On this funky winter day in rainy San Francisco I've had a vision of Leonardo da Vinci?. My woman's out slaving away, no day off, working on Sunday. She left here at eight o'clock this morning for Powell and California. I've been sitting here ever since like a toad on a log dreaming about Leonardo da Vinci.

I dreamt he was on the South Bend Tackle Company payroll, but of course, he was wearing different clothes and speaking with a different accent and possessor of a different childhood, perhaps an American childhood spent in a town like Lordsburg, New Mexico, or Winchester, Virginia.

I saw him inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America. I saw him first of all working with his imagination, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little of this and a little of that, and then adding motion and then taking it away and then coming back again with a different motion, and in the end the lure was invented.

He called his bosses in. They looked at the lure and all fainted. Alone, standing over their bodies, he held the lure in his hand and gave it a name. He called it "The Last Supper." Then he went about waking up his bosses.

In a matter of months that trout fishing lure was the sensation of the twentieth century, far outstripping such shallow accomplishments as Hiroshima or Mahatma Gandhi?. Millions of "The Last Supper" were sold in America. The Vatican ordered ten thousand and they didn't even have any trout there.

Testimonials poured in. Thirty-four ex-presidents of the United States all said, "I caught my limit on 'The Last Supper.'"


Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America