One of the nice things about being retired is that now that my daily routine is less demanding I have time to do those things I always wanted to do. The problem is that I can’t remember what they were.

I do recall that I used to think it might be interesting to hike the Appalachian Trail from one end to the other, but now that I’m walking with a cane and scheduled for a hip replacement, I guess I waited too long.

Maybe I could go fishing. There’s this lake not too far from where we live and I see people sitting there in canvas folding chairs with their lines in the water, and since they never seen to catch anything, it doesn’t look like it takes a lot of energy.

But to be honest about it, I can’t really tell you that fishing is one of those things I always wanted to do when I grew older. However, it seems like something I should have always wanted to do.

You know the image – a Norman Rockwell cover on an old copy of "Saturday Evening Post" comes to mind. Grandpa standing alongside the river bank, a trout dancing on its tail at the end of his gracefully arced line and his grandson, or in my case, a great grandson, looking up at him with a "Golly Gee!" expression of admiration in his eyes. Generally there’s a happy dog in the picture, too.

The problem is I don’t know much about fishing. Oh, as a kid I did my share of it with a bamboo pole, and there was even the time I caught this mess of sunfish and brought them home strung on a line the way Huckleberry Finn would have done it.

"Can we have them for dinner?" I remember once asking mom.

"Sure," she said. "But you’ll have to clean them first."

After I had found out what was inside the first one, I gave them all to the cat and from then on I always threw anything I caught back.

Maybe I take after my dad. He was a city guy who preferred spectator sports like the fights at Madison Square Garden or a game at Yankee Stadium instead of risking a case of poison ivy by hunting down some hapless animal in the woods. I only remember once that he took me fishing, if you could call it that. He had taken the family to the Jersey shore and all these men were fishing at the end of a pier so he bought a line with a large hook and sinker on the end so I could fish, too. You didn’t need a pole. The line was wound on a wooden handle, like kite string. When we found a spot on the pier he said he’d get the line in the water for me so he swung the sinker and hook around and around over his head and then he let go. Only he didn’t hold on to the end and the whole contraption went flying out into the ocean. I guess that’s what they mean by "hook, line and sinker."

Unlike my own father, my father-in-law was an avid fisherman who would catch trout by using live grasshoppers for bait, but he quickly gave up all hope of converting me into an outdoorsman when he found out that I couldn’t even catch the grasshoppers.

I did go deep sea fishing several times when I was a young man, but I generally went along with the other guys more for the beer and the boat ride than for the fishing. I’d find myself wishing that, instead of holding a pole, they would have let me handle the helm. I always enjoyed being at sea, and even when everyone else aboard was pulling in Blues as fast they could get their hooks back in the water, I spent most of my time gazing off to the horizon and daydreaming about the distant shores that lay beyond it. Fish, I figured, was in the same category as beef; just because you ate it, didn’t mean you had to make believe you were a cowboy and take part in the roundup.

But there must be some outdoor hobby an old guy like me can take up now that the warm weather is here. Maybe I could just sit on a bench in the park and watch the children play. Except in this day and age, even that can be risky. Someone might call the police to make sure I’m not some sort of pervert. Perhaps there will be some other old guy there who’d like to play chess like they do in the parks in New York City. A good game of chess, particularly between two guys who don’t move too fast anymore, could drag on for most of an afternoon.