I’ve been trying to kill a goldfish for the last six months.
You see, once upon a time, Charlotte wanted a goldfish, and we bought your garden-variety golden fantail type 89-cent goldfish at the pet shop, put him in a little fishbowl, and set it on the mantle. And he (or she, who can tell) lived like that for a while until I read some online screed about how keeping goldfish in fishbowls was cruel and unusual punishment and he really should be in a proper aquarium with a bubbler and brightly-colored gravel and some bit of sculpture and all that, plus another fish to give him someone to talk to. So, filled with guilt, I bought all that stuff. Then, as it must happen to all living things, the goldfish died and we went through a phase of several successors in the aquarium, none of whom lasted very long.
After this Parade of Piscicide, the population of said aquarium stabilized with the acquisition of a black pop-eyed fantail we named Eye-gor and a tri-colored one we called Patches. And so they lived happily ever after, despite near total neglect from us, until Patches could stand it no more and shuffled off his mortal coil right around Christmas last year. Since whatever interest Charlotte ever had in owning a goldfish had evaporated like the water in the aquarium a long, long, long time ago, and since neither Bridget nor I really had much interest in the care and maintenance of the fish tank, I decided that I would let Eye-gor go the way of all things, too.
Except Eye-gor decided otherwise and hung on against all odds ever since, despite an ever-dwindling amount of water in his tank and having to subsist on whatever bits of fish food detritus remained in the bottom of it. For six months, I have looked at that tank every day hoping to see his little black fins floating at the top of the puddle-like bit of water, and have been greeted with his swimming about as though nothing was going on.
So this week we finally relented. Any fish that could last that long, by gum, was a survivor of the first degree and deserved to live. We refilled the tank, detoxed the water, replaced the filter, and surrendered to the Amazing Eye-gor, The Invincible Fish. He swam around like a man freed from solitary confinement, exploring his refilled home as if for the first time. Humbled, Bridget and I agreed we would give Eye-gor the respect he clearly deserved.
Yesterday morning, Charlotte decided that since Eye-gor had not been fed for so long that it would be a good idea to dump the entire contents of a container of fish food into the tank. And now he is dead. Killed not by neglect but by kindness. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Apparently fish are harder to kill than I thought. Check out this creepy video:
Did I mention we’re getting a new kitten this weekend?


Rush Limbaugh notwithstanding, it seems like everybody has been motivated to do something to try to help the people of Haiti. Early last week, Charlotte’s teacher sent an e-mail to all of the parents of her class to let us know that they would be running a lemonade stand to solicit donations for Haitian relief efforts from their classmates; parents were asked to contribute items they would need, such as cups, juicers and a huge amount of fresh lemons, and, if possible, to sign up to help out on the day of the event. We signed up to provide the cups, and I volunteered to go in and help out.
I think the actual task was a little bit bigger than the teacher had imagined when she came up with the idea, but the kids were exceedingly well-behaved and did whatever was asked of them. As the momentum of things shifted from one task to another, I tried to run interference and do whatever seemed to need to be done: showing the kids how to stir the bottoms of the containers to dissolve all the sugar, ferrying completed containers to the “Ice Patrol” to keep them working steadily, clearing away the emptied water jugs, and so on. Our hour and a half sped by, and the kids were rewarded with a cup of their lemonade; as you can imagine, some batches were unbearably sweet, others impossibly tart, some just watery. The kids mostly drank their cups, though some only took a sip or two. The kids were then seated for an early lunch so they could spend their regular lunch period selling the lemonade, and the adults handled cleanup and pre-pouring the lemonade for service. A second shift of parents had volunteered for the lunch hour selling, and they began to drift in just as we finished and the rest of the school kids were starting to line up for the caf.





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