With all the isolation this year it has to be pretty tough on the children. They don’t quite understand why they can’t visit people or run through the playground on a nice day. On a spur of the moment trip to the pet store, my wife decided it would be a good idea to purchase a beta fish for our son so that he had something alive to talk to other than us and the plants. We’ve been toying with the idea of getting a dog but after losing our 14-year-old Boxer at the beginning of the year we just don’t have the emotional bandwidth for something with fur.
Throughout the years we’ve had a couple of beta fish. They’re about as low maintenance as they get unless you change their water out with distilled water as we found out many years ago… They really are a great animal to teach your child of the responsibility for taking care of another living thing with minimal investment. I always liked staring at fish when I was a kid and knew my son would love his, but there was a deep apprehension with this fish that I couldn’t quite put my finger on until the memory bubbled up right before I fell asleep last night.
When I was a kid I won a goldfish at some carnival for throwing ping pong balls into a bucket or some similar game. A fellow with jack-o-lantern style dental work scooped the fish out of a larger bucket and put it in a ziplock bag with a cup of water in it and sent me off with the warning of, “don’t ye drop or it’s dead”. It’s really quite amazing that the fish survived the drive back to the house sloshing around in my white-knuckled fist as my mom took curve after curve on the straightest road in Georgia. Then when I got it home we just dumped it into an old jar and there it lived.
Every night I would tell it about my day and every morning I would tell it, “Good Morning” and give it a few flakes of food. And that is how it went for my swimming best friend and me for a good half a year or so. If the water started to stink my dad would dump out the jar with his callused fingers serving as a strainer and catch the fish, then we’d rinse out the jar, fill it back up, and plop the fish back in there probably to suffer through nicotine withdrawal.
I have always had a profound love for pamphlets and bulletins from churches. They were honestly the only source of scrap paper I ever had so I’d take as many as I could so I could draw on them in my free time. During the Lenten Season that year, I recall all of the church bulletins had a scene of the crucifixion. I stole a couple of handfuls of the blank bulletins and took them home with me. I do not recall thinking I had done anything sinful by taking these bulletins but perhaps I had.
I would sit at my little desk drawing on the blank bulletins pretending I was a Renaissance artist. It happened the fish’s jar also lived on the table so I would show him what I was drawing and we’d talk. I think he really liked my work but maybe he liked it too much. When I woke up that Easter morning to rush and see what the Easter Bunny had left me I stopped like I always did to feed my fish. But the fish was not in his jar. Somehow during the night, he had managed to jump out of his jar and land directly on top of Jesus on the cross and instantly dried to the paper. Divine intervention? I’m not sure I have decided. All I know is that I started buying my own drawing paper and my son’s new best friend is in a tank with a lid.
