Mr. Hoffman!

Tender bleaders--

Please give a warm Sweet Tea welcome to my dear friend, my faithful confidant, and my estate sale purchase...

Mr. Hoffman, hangin' on the wall like a boss.

Hoffman. Mister Hoffman.

While I can't explain or justify it, it's true that I had been wanting a piece of taxidermy for a few years. I'm not a sportsman, so killing procuring something on my own wasn't exactly an option. And, even though I often find myself poking around "oddities" places and such, I just never could find what I was looking for. Much like porn, I figured I'd know it when I saw it.

And there I was. And there he was. In an estate sale in a SWANK neighborhood in a St. Louis suburb. I happened by there on a Sunday, when everything was half-price. He was originally marked $40. And now he was 20. TWENTY. DOLLARS. You read that right, my gossamer little goldfishies.

I dug him out of a pile of golf clubs, beat-up old baskets, and Mary-Had-A-Little-Lamb piano sheet music. He needed love:

Also, he was six-foot-two. And covered in gawd knows how many years of dust. And I had no place to put him. But I couldn't walk away because...he tugged at my heartstrings with this: a catch certificate. From August 27, 1945:

Sorry about the picture quality. Don't like it? Buy me a fancy phone or camera.

According to this catch certificate, he was a sailfish who had been caught in 1945 aboard the yacht "Rex," which was owned by the Miami Beach Rod and Reel Club. His catcher, Harold Hoffman of St. Louis, MO, by virtue of this 38-pound catch, had been made an honorary member of the Miami Beach Sailfish Club.

Fast-forward nearly 70 years, and this gorgeous beast lay ignored in the dusty basement of Harold Hoffman's estate sale. The catch certificate wasn't even framed. I figured that Harold Hoffman had gone to a boys' weekend after he and his buddies came home from WWII, caught this sexy beast, brought him home to proudly show Mrs. Hoffman (I imagine that she was named Marilyn), and Marilyn promptly relegated him and his un-framed catch certificate to the basement, along with Harold's old copies of  Playboy and his frat-boy collection of shot glasses (which were also covered in dust and half-off that Sunday).

Harold and Marilyn Hoffman have likely gone on to the big yacht in the sky, but this sailfish--Mr. Hoffman--has found a home. He now lives in an army-green guest room in my 125-year-old house.

The last time my sister stayed the night with me, I had just moved in and my furniture hadn't even been delivered yet, so we were sleeping on blow-up mattresses. The next time she comes to visit, though, she'll sleep in a still-not-painted guest room, under the watchful glass eye of Mr. Hoffman:

For all you dear bleaders who find Mr. Hoffman as irresistible as I do, the house is improving slowly but surely. Let me know when you want to come visit, and you, too, can sleep under Mr. Hoffman's steady gaze.

For those of you who are creeped out by a six-foot-two, seventy-year-old sailfish hanging on the wall of a surely-ghost-infested, 125-year-old house...here's a video of a guinea pig eating a cucumber peel: