Charlie Brown and I had the same vocabulary, featuring a plaintive howl everytime Lucy yanked the football away. My battle was with the fly tyer’s of  A.J. McClane’s Standard Fishing Encyclopedia – it was the bible featuring color plates of flies and their recipes, allowing me to gauge my proportions against the real thing.

I’d always be three quarters finished when they’d mention Medium Blue Dun, or Gray Jungle Fowl – and I’d start cursing in earnest. Substitution is a four letter word when you’re learning how to tie flies, usually you’re already substituting the right way of doing it with your way, and to replace materials wholesale is akin to cheating.

Matching the completed fly with the grainy photo in A.J. McClane’s book was compounded by the fluorescent green hackle you’d substituted for medium blue dun, enough of a change to reduce effectiveness and preventing the fly from earning a spot in your box – as it’s now somehow tainted.

Years later we found out that a Greenwell’s Glory couldn’t catch crap, and the chartreuse hackle we’d added could only have helped.

I lived in fear of fine print, as every author hid the “mongoose mask hair” or “rutting beaver forepaw” behind an asterisk or small text, and delighted in knowing some new tyer was uttering a howl of protest.

As a kid I’d take my hard earned coin down to the fly shop and press my nose against the glass, psyching myself up for the pending ordeal; dividing $2.18 among thousands of “needs” – and winding up with 14 little glassine bindles of feather dander.

Sure, I had rabbit aplenty, but never Olive rabbit, or Olive thread, everything I tied for the first decade was black thread, Size A Nymo – and I was a stud for scoring that. My Light Cahill’s suffered accordingly, as once they were dampened they were Really Dark Cahill’s.

Now that I’m old and mean, I recognize that ritual of suffering is a crucial component in rounding the skills of a good fly tyer. Suffering steeled your resolve when neighbor’s tabby met steel belted radial and a dull Buck knife and swift burial were warranted. Lingering at the gut pile meant you could high grade all the mallards, widgeon, sprig, and teal – fighting maggots for the best flank feathers. It taught you to accelerate at the deer – in the last possible moment, rather than brake hard and have him come through the windshield.

…and that critical moment when you connected the dots and realized all those bludgeoned baby seal’s were needed for a full dress Green Highlander? You shrugged it off quickly in your haste to score a dime bag…

Now that you’ve reached your maturity, forged hard by the crucible of those tyers what came before you, tithing “one tenth of your get” to animal fur and brightly colored feathers, it’s time to instill in your legacy as many obscure items as practical so the next kid quits in tears.

Time is on your side, Old Guys get to have dusty old boxes of “the Good Stuff” hidden away. Most of the dust is moth eggs, but even the rumor of stash is enough to keep a young prick in deferential mode – he’ll save the lip for his parents, where it counts.

It’s your responsibility to send subsequent generations screaming in defeat, so it’s doubly important to recognize an impossible material when you see it. Low production and esoteric usage helps, and very little is needed. Enough to comprise an egg sac on a dry fly, or articulated limb on a nymph – just enough to make the fly impossible to tie.

It’s like a quiver of arrows, you trot them out as needed – each trial more difficult than the last..

I’m holding the above in the wings, next time some fly tyer claims, “I seen my buddy tie that,” I’ll trot out the “Lagoon” color on some money fly, and watch him writhe in agony. 100% viscose, flat chenille in colors not likely to grace a fly shop anytime this century.

A.J. McClane got me with rare and exotic animals, urine dyed fox, and twisted silks from the Orient, my legacy will be synthetics that were used to trim Elvis Presley’s Cadillac…

I bet A.J. was an SOB too, must be why I liked his books so much.