October 25, 2010
I just dated my blog. That is how little I know about blogs. I'm guessing that somewhere the template I chose probably dates the entry automatically. But again, I'm guessing. What if I'm wrong? Thus, the date. Clearly, I did not do much research before diving into this.
One might think, from reading the title of this blog, that it is about fish. One would be wrong. This is very much not about fish. This is about the everyday goings on of me, my husband, my kids, and our lives. Sometimes funny things happen. Sometimes they are tragically funny. Or funnily tragic. I make up words. You should know that about me.
Back to the title. Years ago, I'm guessing maybe eight years ago or so (I could be off by several years either way--you should also know that I'm not a detail person) we had a large fishtank. It sat on a shelf halfway up the wall going up our stairs. Our tank had two fish I think. Might have been one. Again, not a detail girl. But I'm pretty sure it was two. They had names. One might have been named Mr. Frumble, like the little character from the Busy Town books and cartoon show. The other had a name, also, but it escapes me. It was something girly sounding, like Lilya or Petunia.
Our two kids (who would have been around 5 and 7 at the time) would occasionally watch the fish swim around. My husband would feed the fish (I think it's great that the word fish is actually both the singular and plural, because now it doesn't really matter if it was one or two, does it?) every night as he walked up the stairs to go to bed. When the glass on the front of the tank got so green that you couldn't tell if there was anything in the tank, someone (and by someone, I mean my husband) would clean the tank, making the glass clear and the water sparkling. It looked beautiful when it was clean, so much so that we would always comment that since the tank was in such a prominent place in our home, we should always keep it looking so clean. We didn't really follow through much on that.
Anyway, so here's this tank with fish. And everything seemed to be fine. Or so I thought.
One morning, after getting the kids off to school and getting some errands done, I noticed that the lid to the tank was half open. You have to open it like that to feed the fish, so I assumed that perhaps it had gotten left open after the fish were fed the previous evening. It had happened many times before, no big deal. However, this time I noticed that there were little water droplets on the table just below the fish tank. Odd. The filter was on as usual, and it was bubbling, but no more than it usually did. Certainly not enough to splash outside of the tank.
And then I saw her. Him. It. I really don't know which fish it was.
He/she/it was lying on the floor, on the cold, hard saltillo paver tile, lifeless, in a tiny little pool of water. I didn't know what to do. This kind of thing had never happened to me before. So I did the only thing I could think of upon encountering a non-breathing body. I gently lifted him/her/it to the kitchen counter, and tried gentle compressions to get its tiny body to breathe. I know. Really, I know. That poor little fish. If there was any life left in him/her/it at that point, I'm sure I CPR'd it right out. I sort of forgot that fish don't have the whole "P" part of CPR. In my defense, when my heroic actions did not bring any life back to the little guy, I did try putting it in a bowl of water. Probably should have tried that first.
I wasn't thinking clearly. All I could think about at the time was how I was going to tell our kids that their fish had died. I knew they wouldn't take it well. Our son would be stoic, but he would be so sad. And our daughter, I was positive, would collapse into wrecks of sobbing tears and never get over the emotional scar. And I would have to somehow carry on knowing that life in the tank had gotten so bad for our poor little fish that he/she/it had jumped. The fish jumped.
So, this blog--not about fish. Just about funny or quirky or adventurous or interesting little things that happen in the lives of our family.
Epilogue: The kids came through with no permanent traumatization. My son now has a somewhat large fishtank in his room. Luckily for him, the fish he has in there apparently need no light, as the front glass is 99% of the time covered in a thick, green algae (that according to him, the fish love, because they like to eat it....dubious). My daughter has a small fish bowl in her room, with one fish in it. The bowl has no cover on it. I check everyday to make sure that fish looks happy.
I still do not know the names of any of my kids' fish.
No comments:
Post a Comment