And You Think You Got Troubles
	"You ought to meet this guy," my office partner said. "He's an old-timer, nice man. He said he had all this fly fishing stuff from all the years he's been fishing. He had both his knees replaced and can't get around any more, so he's looking to get rid of it. I don't know anything about what he was talking about but he went on and on, said he had a collection of every fly there was, from 60-70 years back. He said something about tying his flies up right on the stream, when he had caught a fish. He had other stuff too, poles and reels he wants to get rid of. I didn't know what else to do but tell him that I would talk to you and you might want to go out there and look at what he had. You do some fly fishing, don't you? His name's Ira, but he likes to be called 'Shorty'." That conversation haunted me for days, there was so much promise to it. I had once before in my life been blessed by a lightning strike that was almost the flyfishing equivalent of winning the state lottery. A call had come through to me years before, at 11 PM, catching up to me at an unexpected time, in an unexpected place. I had met a woman a week before, gone on a date and just hadn't, well, gone home yet. 11 PM in a new relationship is an interesting time to take a call, even about flyfishing. The caller was an old patient of mine, someone I only vaguely remembered. How she tracked me down remains a mystery. "Hi, sorry to trouble you at this hour but you were the only person I could think of to call. I'm an insurance adjuster and the police finally caught up with the boys that knocked off the fly shop in town about six months ago, remember? They really cleaned it out. Well, the insurance company paid off on the claim a long time ago. Now I've got all this stuff in my office and I'm supposed to get rid of it for whatever I can get for it. I don't really know what any of it is worth, but I've got to do something in a hurry. It's floor to ceiling, wall to wall. I can't even get to my desk. There's more people coming tomorrow but I just happened to think of you. Do you want to come down now and look it over? You fly fish don't you?" I did manage to tear myself away, though it took a lot of fast talking. Priorities can get skewed sometimes. I drove down to the address she had given me, was met at the locked door of a darkened office building, and ushered into an office that looked like an Orvis Santa Claus staging area. The kids who pulled off the robbery knew what they were doing. They had grabbed the big ticket items first and
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