When I was around five years old, I went to a carnival with my grandfather and at one of the games I won a goldfish inside a plastic bag. This was probably the highlight of my life up to that point. Our Golden Retriever, Katie, died when I was four and ever since I desperately wanted a new pet. Using the same creativity with which I'd named all my stuffed animals, I gave new pet goldfish the name Fishy.
I brought Fishy home and put him in a small fishbowl. I fed him and I changed his water and I carried his bowl around with me everywhere I went. But Fishy was not long for this world. He died within three days of coming home with me.
Most of my memories of Fishy are of the excitement of getting him, but I have a vague memory of being kind of devastated by his death. I was fairly certain it was my fault, and I remember being told that carnival goldfish never live long. In retrospect, that's not a very comforting thought, but I think it helped me get over it. Fishy's fate, as a carnival goldfish, was always going to be an all-too-short life.
After his death, I asked what to do with him, and was told that dead fish get put in the toilet. All I remember is taking Fishy to the toilet and solemnly flushing him to his watery grave. This is not the story that gets told, however. According to my parents, my childhood nanny walked by my bathroom at the moment after I had put Fishy in the toilet but before I had flushed him down and overheard me say, "Well, Fishy, when you gotta go, you gotta go." And away he went.
This story has been told and retold and retold endless times by my parents over the years, as part of a joke they like to tell about how they can't put faith in any of their children to take care of them when they're old. If I treated my beloved Fishy so uncaringly, how would I treat them?
This story has always infuriated me. Maybe it happened, or maybe it didn't—I can't really be sure, since I have absolutely no memory of what I said to Fishy before I sent his corpse away. And what bothers me about the story is not the joke about the grim future my parents envision; that's just a joke. What drives me crazy is the way in which this story represents my relationship with Fishy. My character in this story is of a little kid who is all too willing to callously sever ties with the animal he loved only minutes earlier. But I refuse to believe Fishy's death was that easy for me, and I resent the way in which my parents co-opted my relationship with my pet and reshaped it into something for their own means.
This story has become all that is ever said about Fishy, so I just wanted to take this opportunity to say: I loved Fishy, and ours was a magical, whirlwind romance. It may have only lasted three days, but from start to finish I loved him deeply and with all of my heart, and he will always have a special place in the very small pantheon of animals who have touched me.
2 comments:
This is my favorite blog post ever! You take that story BACK from the emotional distortions of your parents' mythologizing, Dan.
(A thought: Could it be, at least to some degree, that they so latched on to this rewriting in part because they couldn't handle how sad the whole episode actually was and so didn't want to acknowledge the sincerity of your feelings?)
I think you might be right, Alec, but I wonder if it isn't an indirect uncomfortability they had with the sincerity of my feelings for *them.* Maybe the sadness I felt for Fishy, a goldfish I'd known for only 3 days, made them concerned about their own mortality and my ability to deal with it, so they constructed a narrative that establishes their relative unimportance in my life.
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