Fish

[Martin Hash]

Fish.jpg

I'm trying to decorate my house is what's called “Modern” design, from about a decade after 1956, the year my wife, Gwynne, was born. One of the centerpieces is a cylindrical fishtank coffee table. I bought it long ago before they got so expensive; certainly couldn't replace it now without a lot of thought. Over the years, it's been though a lot of fish: ones we've bought and ones people bring over when they get to big for their own tanks. The fish would live a long time except when they get the size of your hand, the Angel fish commit Hara Kiri by jumping up and bouncing themselves off the glass through the two-inch gap, and out onto the hardwood floor where they suffocate and I find them all dehydrated and glued down in the morning. The sucker fish get huge and I'd probably have to kill them but every few years I'm gone and no one feeds them, or the heater quits working, and they all die, then we start out with a dozen or so little fish again. The one thing I hate is the twice-a-year tank cleaning; it takes all day and it's icky. Speaking of ich, that's a kind of disease fish get, though my fish have never got it because I give them fish antibiotics, which are the same as human antibiotics except they taste terrible; I know because I tried them just in case I need them when the world collapses.

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The other day my son, Heath, came into my office while I was working to visit before he had to go to work.
“Hey, Dad, whatcha doin’?” he asked, cheerfully.
“Same ol’. Same ol’,” I replied, not looking up from the computer screen. I was pretty busy; I had a lot to do that day.
“What are you doing?” I asked back, distractedly, still not looking up.
“Oh, me?” he answered. “I’m just turning off the water.”
That was random. “Turning off the water?” I half-asked curiously, still busy.
“Yeah, you know; when you leave the hose on to fill up the fish tank, and it overflows and covers the white oak hardwood floors in a half-inch of water.”
Yikes! I jumped up. “I left the water on!”
“I know you like to multitask and do a lot of things simultaneously,” Heath explained pedantically. “And I don’t want to sound like I’m giving advice to the wisest man in the world, but it might be a good idea to stay focused on some tasks longer than twenty seconds,” he suggested.
“I waited longer than twenty seconds,” I defended myself.
Heath looked at me through half-lidded eyes.
“I did,” I explained. “I waited like two minutes. We’ve been gone and the tank was lower than normal. The heater must be set too high.”
“Really?” Heath said sarcastically. “Imagine your bad luck. Anyway, I got out all the old towels.”
So we spent the next hour sopping all the water off the floor then we put all the wet towels out in the sun to dry - over a hundred of them.
A couple hours later Gwynne came home; we were talking for a while before she looked out the back doors.
“Why did you cover the patio with dirty towels?” She asked, amazed & confused.
“Oh, I was working on something,” I told her. “No big deal; fish emergency.”

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