Fish #2

Actually, this post is months late. I thought about posting it months ago, but I had other things I wanted to write about instead. And while the people I work with would never believe me if I told them I do procrastinate at times (they have taken to putting “No Rush” in their e-mails when I don’t have to do that project in the next five minutes)…well, I do – sometimes – procrastinate.

 

You may recall a couple of months ago that we bought Emry a fish. A pet, it would seem, that is not as simplistic as I would have thought. (But it is 2020, so nothing is simplistic.) We brought “Pink Flower” home and I followed all the rules the lady at the pet store yammered off to me…or so I thought. The fish wasn’t in the tank for two days before it died.

 

I found it that night, hoping against hope that it was…sleeping? But it wasn’t. And I started to cry. I don’t believe in all my forty years I have cried over a pet before. I haven’t had a lot of pets and I didn’t really get emotionally involved with the few I had. But I cried over this dead fish. It would be easy to wave it aside as hormones (which was probably part of the problem), but I really didn’t know how I was going to tell Emry. Her first longed for pet had died. And I was pretty sure I had somehow killed it. Not intentionally, of course, but somewhere in the long list of instructions I had failed to follow something. And now I had a dead fish. And the prospects of one very said little girl. 

 

And she was sad. Although she shed a lot less tears than I did. And we took her back to the pet store that very day to get a new fish. For the one glimmer in all of this was we had a two-week warranty on the fish (it came with that for free) so we didn’t have to pay for a new one! I also brought in a sample of the water from the tank for them to test and asked the lady for very specific instructions on how to get this fish safely into our tank. Since our water tested just fine for this new fish’s survival, I carefully followed the instructions. And “Green Star” the fish is still with us!

 

To be honest, this little greenish blue Beta fish is a surprisingly fun little thing. It comes up to you when you go to look at it. (Which I do quite a lot…still fearful this one will die on me, too!) It seems to know Emry, who is very faithful to feed it each morning. Even Ellyson enjoys watching it. I never thought a fish had a personality, but this one almost seems to. So, all in all, the whole adventure of our first pet has turned out quite well. 

And now Emry reminds me weekly that she is ready for a dog…and a cat…