Goldfish Story

Someone who knows my wife won a goldfish.  A goldfish was a prize for something.  A strange, lonesome life in a small glass cube.  That person asked my wife to watch the goldfish while she (the person) was away during spring break.  My wife brought the fish in, & set it in the middle of the dining room table.

We live in a house full of cats.  There are four of them.  Immediately I felt anxious for the poor goldfish.  My wife decided to cover the cube of water with some foil, with a couple of holes for air, but it bothered me even more.  (Probably irrationally - I've never owned a fish, & I didn't know if covering a cubic bowl with holey foil was safe.)  (But I didn't look it up on the net or anything.)  (Sometimes I think I get a little high on my anxiety & don't necessarily want it to be suddenly cured.)

I told my wife for safety we might put the fish in a spare room.  By itself.  My wife, as unfamiliar with owning a fish as I was, worried she might forget to feed the fish, & so, while she agreed to put the goldfish somewhere safe, she did write on our refrigerator whiteboard, "FISH! FISH! FISH!"

The fish found itself sitting on a bookcase next to a window by itself in a spare room with the door closed.  Which also made me very sad.  The fish by itself in a cube-shaped container (with a large plastic fish as its only companion) on a table in a busy house bothered me.  The fish in the room by itself bothered me.

The wife & I were about to go to Atlanta, & we had a person coming out to feed the cats.  She's a professional pet sitter but did that include fish?  Fish hidden in a spare room?

Our sweet neighbors - who also have a lovely beagle girl - agreed to watch the fish, & out of sight was out of mind.  Until I dreamt about the fish this morning.

Look, although I am vegan, & firmly believe in the rights of animals not to be abused by humans, I'm not against keeping them as pets.  (I have four cats & three dogs, you know.)  In the case of dogs, suddenly abandoning them would be absurd - they have co-evolved with us for millennia.  Cats are slightly different, because they're only a bit less feral when they're with humans, but I'm on the "better in here with us versus outside in the elements" side of the keeping them healthy & happy argument*.  My cats, even if they don't know, are much happier inside than the alternative.

But I get sad when I see a lonely dog in a backyard, completely ignored by the humans who own it.  Dogs want & need to be with humans &/or other dogs.  When our sweet neighbors adopted the beagle girl, they brought her into a home already comfortably filled two other dogs.  She was immediately so happy - she knew that she had found her forever pack.

Maybe the goldfish in the cubic bowl wouldn't have bothered me so much if it had had a goldfish companion.  After all, it's probably safer (to use my cat argument) in that small space than in the wild, where it might be lunch for a bigger fish, or one of those poor, doomed feral cats.  Yet something felt wrong, & caused me inner turmoil, to see it so solitary in such a small space.

I am thinking of going to a therapist.  Not because of this, this just happened as I was considering the idea.  But you know that this goldfish story would be a lengthy conversation.

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* As I wrote this line, it began to rain outside.