17 VIII 2002 - 23:00 - verba28

This is an Alchera project for August 2002.

Here are the terms:

OPTION NO. FOUR: This one's for the pet lovers... I would venture to say that everyone has had at least one neat pet, but sometimes that's not true. For those that have had that one pet that was really special, tell us about him/her. Personally, I've had so many pets it's impossible to count them (I used to keep a journal about each pet, but God only knows where that's wandered off to), but there is that one special pet that I'll never forget. What memories do you have with your pet, what made him/her so special? If you have pictures, that's even better :)

Flipper was a survivor.

I've had a series of fish over the years -- most of them won from the school fair contests where you throw a hoop over a lollipop stick and win the lollipop and, if you're lucky, a fish -- but Flipper was the only one to last more than a few months. In part, this was because he was the last fish I got and I had a good idea of how not to make some basic mistakes.

Unfortunately, my fish didn't seem to photograph so well, and so I've got no pictures, but I remember him in his first container after the plastic bag. The vase we found for him was, we soon found, a little too small for him. So we got him a fishtank.

I keep saying 'him,' but we couldn't really tell what sex he was. My sister, who spent the most time with him when she was at home during his last two years, came to the conclusion that 'he' was actually female, after looking at the clear spots in his droppings. It didn't matter. To the rest of us, Flipper was always male. How could he not be, when his favorite thing to do was to flip himself out of his container and lie, gasping, on the floor, until someone noticed and hurriedly put him back in water? There's an unsettling similarity between that behavior and some teenage boys.

I think he did it to get attention; he never did it when we weren't around to pick him up. Flipper was a lonely fish; when we got six other goldfish to keep him company, four died immediately, and he ate the other two. We tried to blame his little problem with cannibalism on the rather violent earthquake that had happened only a week before. Trauma, we thought, knowing that it probably wasn't true, but finding it more palatable than the thought that our fish was really a homicidal maniac who'd eat anything.

Towards the end, he started growing white fuzz and turning white, and the people at the fish store gave us some sort of medicine that turned the water a bright green. Fungus, they said. The medicine got rid of the white fuzz, but he kept turning whiter. It was horrible to see this fish turning into a shadow of his once-glorious orange self.

When he died, it had been six years since I'd gotten him, which is not the longest a goldfish has ever lived, but it's certainly not the shortest. He died, of course, while everyone was gone, so that we could come home to the drama of a floating fish corpse in our tank.

He's rotting ten paces to the west of the side door to our house. But we prefer to use the word 'resting.' It's sort of a sad end to the story of my longest-lived pet. I'm sure, however, that he's in some sort of fish heaven, the kind where all the hooks slide right out and where, if you do get caught, it's only to be a well-treated pet.

I hope he's out there being impossible and making some other kid deliriously happy; I can't conceive of him in any other way.