Although my father was a mild-mannered accountant when I left for the colony of British Honduras (in those days, the capital was Belize—not Belize City, just Belize), he got into a lot of scrapes as a kid. One of them involved an older half brother and a fishhook. The particulars of what took place are fuzzy, but at the end, my father had a fishhook lodged in his ear. He went through the rest of his life with a punctured eardrum.