Fishy

Fishie

There are funny things that happen. Funny stuff. I don’t know that the rest of the world outside my bubble will find them funny but? Today, I put on my pants and, inadvertently, included one arm of my robe. It was stuffed down my backside. As I walked away, I jumped… noticing that something, someone was following me! aieeeeee! See? Funny stuff.

There are less funny things that happen. Fireball air-crashes, lunatic politics, dead bodies all around. Such things are not funny and I learned, as a child, to make light of them. At least, I learned to make light-er of the rough things. Humour helps a soul over the threshold and out into the sunshine again. A little bit of a joke gives you distance from tragedy. A chuckle turns the ghost into a sheet, waving in the wind. There is enough tragedy and some of it is better done to push away from. Our dead pet fish, for example. It was sad, the method by which the poor thing did expire. So tragic, that careless alcohol over-use created conditions that allowed for the death of our fish. It wasn’t wanton, drunken, abusive violence, it was a drunken accident, performed by a loving and quite charming man who couldn’t do better than he did. It wouldn’t be good and isn’t necessary to see it otherwise. Laugh, a little. Shit happens.

My fellows-in-childhood and I woke to a grisly scene one Saturday morning, many years ago. Broken glass, broken records, an upended piece of furniture, a dead body. During the sordid previous evening, a floating, numbed person had scuffled with a perfectly still tall phonograph. It was my dad and one of the old hand-crank acoustical 78 players. The player being one of those surprising machines that required no electricity and were much louder than you might expect, their bowels being a labyrinth of ever-expanding acoustic horn. With the doors on the front opened, the music was absolutely audible. As a part of the machine, there was record storage. When everything was closed up, the top surface became a perch for one glass bowl containing a goldfish. Our pet. Our ‘Fishie’.

At morning, that fateful Saturday, I ambled out to the living room and there he was, ‘fishie’… wedged under the door-threshold, dry as a bone, dead as a door-nail. He looked astonished, as though having been suddenly, inexplicably awakened by some confusion that ended with him skidding across the rough floorboards and coming to his final rest. He had been jammed in the tiny space, unable to flap about or gasp. It must have been a quick end. I hope it was quick. When the fish died, so did a few 78 rpm records. I think one of the records lost must have been Marian Anderson’s ‘I Can’t Stay Away’, a personal favourite that I dearly adored, a valuable possession. In the one night’s accident must be how we lost Marian, Marian and Fishie… I have no other idea how that record disappeared and no memory of any other possibility.

When I first purveyed the carnage, spread across the living room floor, I reacted with shock. When did this happen? Why did I not wake to the screams of the fish, the crashing of the phonograph? Well, of course, the fish could not cry out, being wedged as he was. Maybe, the phonograph did one of those slow tips forward, emptying its beloved contents in a slow motion manner. Maybe it didn’t make all that much noise? Maybe the household was too fast asleep to have been interrupted with such a small event. It was a small event. A small but significant event. It was important. It was a warning that life is going to be a series of ‘small, yet significant’ events.

As my brothers and my sister gathered with me around the disaster site, not a sound was made. Each innocent, speechless pair of eyes was revealing the inner thought, a unison thought – “What the hell?” Finally, to relieve the horror, I noted the similarity of this scene to that when daylight revealed a missing Ichabod Crane… a missing horse, a smashed pumpkin and not another bit of evidence. Yes, it was The Headless Horseman all over the place. I cradled Fishie with an insincere hand. “Oh! Fishie!” I said. My little brother laughed. The pressure was gone. We cleaned up the mess and forgot about it all. No biggie. On we go. There is one caveat, I still think It is better not to think about Marian.