My sister had guppies when we were kids. That was supposed to be a
pet.
I didn’t get it. What kind of pets are fish for a kid?
The oldest of us, my brother, got a dog. My older sister got a cat.
Then my other sister got fish. It all seemed to be going down hill.
I was the youngest, so I didn’t bother asking for a pet. I didn’t
really want an ant farm, and I figured that was next in line.
Is a pet a pet if you can’t pet the pet? Aren’t you supposed to
be able to cuddle a pet? I mean, even an iguana, like the really
mellow one I met at Bernie’s house that spent all day gnawing
leaves off his five foot pot plant, can be scratched under the chin.
I’ve never met a fish that will let you scratch him under the chin.
Maybe a bent index finger looks too much like a hook.
So what do you do with a fish? You can’t teach it to fetch; I
tried it. Sure they go after the thumb tack when you throw it in the
tank, but once they figure out they can’t eat it, they lose all
interest.
“Headley – why are there thumb tacks in the bottom of my
aquarium?”
“Search me – they’re your fish.”
I used to stand there for hours waiting for the moving wallpaper to
do something interesting. Once in a while I would tap on the glass,
until Mom set a rag and a bottle of Windex next the tank with a note
– “You tap it, you clean it.”
Finally it occurred to me why my parents bought fish. It was because
I stood there for hours, tapping or not tapping the glass. I wasn’t
messing up the house, breaking stuff, eating all the Pop Tarts, or
hatching fiendish plots to annoy my siblings. Fish aren’t pets,
they are child pacifiers. I was spending so much time trying to
figure out how they were pets that I didn’t realize – the pet was
me.
So I plotted to steal my brother’s dog – that’s another post.
Maybe it’s like what Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker series.
We don’t do experiments on mice – they do them on us.
Maybe fish
get bored of sitting around in a pond looking at the same slimy rock
and submerged Uniroyal. Maybe the fish arrange for us to dredge them
out and put them in PH balanced environment with a nice plastic
castle, a regular food supply, and a minimum of predatory waterfowl.
And how do the fish see us? Are we like moving wallpaper to them?
Maybe we’re like a really annoying television program that they
can’t turn off.
“Here comes that boy to tap on the glass.”
“Oh, I hate re-runs. Hey, Gill, change the channel, will you?”
“I would, but the underwater remote hasn't been invented yet.”
And thanks to Gill, I have an idea for yet another post.
You can blame this post on MPK who put this vid up on Facebook.
