One of our geriatric goldfish, Silver, swam away to the big bowl in the sky this weekend. You may think we're being clever naming a goldfish Silver but really the goldfish was just silver-y colored. We can be very literal people. The other goldfish is named Gold because he/she is, yes, you guess it, very gold colored.
When I say geriatric, I mean that he/she has been around for more than 3 years but I've lost track of the time. Those fish have survived many, many things such as Winter4 bobbing for apples in their tank when he was only Winter2, a trip to the neighbors to be fish-sat and overfeedings by several well intentioned boys.
I noticed that Silver looked pretty bad one evening while I was making dinner (a dinner of fish sticks, by the way). I didn't take it too seriously as Silver had a melodramatic streak and has appeared to be dying several other times in the past. Within a day, I'll find him swimming around like nothing ever happened. Not this time. He kept up the dying act for a couple of days which made me consider just putting him out of his misery. Enter Summer10 who took moral offense to this idea. I tried to tell him that it's not fair to let Silver flounder (get it?) for days. He told me that it's not fair to make Silver die from not being able to breathe or worse yet die in a sewer pipe. Even though I thought, "Hello! This is a geriatric goldfish!" I appreciated the fact that he had weighed these moral issues and had an opinion.
Fortunately, Silver didn't linger much longer. Now, my confession. I, as a woman who has put her hands in toilets, applied ointment to various locales on all sorts of people and animals and caught vomit with her bare hands is skeeved out by dead goldfish. Mike doesn't understand how I can prepare and eat fish for dinner but can't pull a dead one out of a tank. What can I say? It's just gross!
So, in honor of our Silver, I think I'll lay off the fish entrees for this week and perhaps rescue another 19 cent "feeder fish" so that Gold has a friend.
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