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...regarding fish, and other fish, or (voluntary?) lack thereof.
2003-06-30 - 6:27 p.m.


You know what? I like the *idea* of multitudes of fish. As a kid, I was always interested to hear about those that went to the Fair every year and somehow magically won a goldfish in a plastic bag.

Even my very quiet, seemingly non-fish-inclined friend Sheryl always had a tankful of goldfish at her house.

But me? I've only ever had the one goldfish, and that was completely by accident. One day, sometime in the summer between middle school grades, a friend from up the street and I went for a walk. We stopped for a donut and chocolate milk at Dunkin Donuts, and then we went into a nearby pet store to browse. Goldfish were on sale for some ridiculous price like 49 cents or so.

So my friend bought one- a scrawny little one with some kind of cut under his gill on one side. She said she was going to bring it home and feed it to her cranky Himalayan cat (she was a little odd, by the way). I couldn't tell if she was serious or not. I told her not to do that- I'd take the fish instead. So I took the fish, went back in the store and bought fish food, and then headed home to deposit "Sandy" (after the character in Madeleine L'Engle's "Many Waters", which I was reading at the time) in a pickle jar, for lack of a better place.

Obviously, I didn't know the first thing about fish. Injured or not, Sandy only was with us for three days before he was flushed down a watery grave.

Sandy was the only goldfish I ever had, and even then, that possession was fleeting. Do you ever truly possess something you don't understand, even though you love it so much?

So my point is, yes, there are other goldfish in the fishbowl. Maybe I'm just not cut out to have goldfish, as I failed miserably the first time.

Maybe holding on to a memory, doggedly and with no fruitful reason, gives an illusion of the possession we once had, and which we still crave.

Time and time again, it seems to me like the universe centers around that Pink Floyd song-

"We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl/year after year./Running over the same old ground/what have we found/the same old fears./Wish you were here."

Time stops, a goldfish is swimming in a pickle jar, and a girl is thinking "that's the only fish for me."

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