Walter Watts
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Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
  
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virus: sooner or later, life kicks the bucket
« on: 2004-07-11 20:37:46 » |
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Posted on Sun, Jul. 11, 2004
Take a walk on the wild side
BY DAVE BARRY
Pets are good, because they teach children important lessons about life,
the main one being that, sooner or later, life kicks the bucket.
With me, it was sooner. When I was a boy, my dad, who worked in New York
City, would periodically bring home a turtle in a little plastic tank
that had a little plastic island with a little plastic palm tree, as is
so often found in natural turtle habitats.
I was excited about having a pet, and I'd give the turtle a fun pet name
like Scooter. But my excitement was not shared by Scooter, who, despite
residing in a tropical paradise, never did anything except mope around.
Actually, he didn't even mope around: He moped in one place without
moving, or even blinking, for days on end, displaying basically the same
vital signs as an ashtray. Eventually I would realize -- it wasn't easy
to tell -- that Scooter had passed on to that Big Pond in the Sky, and
I'd bury him in the garden, where he'd decompose and become food for the
zucchini, which in turn would be eaten by my dad, who would in turn go
to New York City, where, compelled by powerful instincts that even he
did not understand, he would buy me another moping death turtle. And so
the cycle of life would repeat.
I say all this to explain why I recently bought fish for my 4-year-old
daughter, Sophie. My wife and I realized how badly she wanted an animal
when she found a beetle on the patio and declared that it was a pet,
named Marvin. She put Marvin into a Tupperware container, where, under
Sophie's loving care and feeding, he thrived for maybe nine seconds
before expiring like a little six-legged parking meter. Fortunately, we
have a beetle-intensive patio, so, unbeknownst to Sophie, we were able
to replace Marvin with a parade of stand-ins of various sizes (''Look!
Marvin has grown bigger!'' ``Wow! Today Marvin has grown smaller!'').
But it gets to be tedious, going out early every morning to wrangle
patio beetles. So we decided to go with fish.
I had fish of my own, years ago, and it did not go well. They got some
disease like Mongolian Fin Rot, which left them basically just little
pooping torsos. But I figured that today, with all the technological
advances we have such as cellular phones and ''digital'' things and
carbohydrate-free toothpaste, modern fish would be more reliable.
So we got an aquarium and prepared it with special water and special
gravel and special fake plants and a special scenic rock so the fish
would be intellectually stimulated and get into a decent college. When
everything was ready I went to the aquarium store to buy fish, my only
criteria being that they should be (1) hardy digital fish; and (2) fish
that looked a LOT like other fish, in case God forbid we had to
Marvinize them.
This is when I discovered how complex fish society is. I'd point to some
colorful fish and say, ''What about these?'' And the aquarium guy would
say, ''Those are great fish, but they do get aggressive when they
mate.'' And I'd say, ''Like, how aggressive?'' And he'd say, ``They'll
kill all the other fish.''
This was a recurring theme. I'd point to some fish, and the aquarium guy
would inform me that these fish could become aggressive if there were
fewer than four of them, or an odd number of them, or it was a month
containing the letter ''R,'' or they heard the song Who Let the Dogs
Out. It turns out that an aquarium is a powder keg that can explode in
deadly violence at any moment, just like the Middle East, or junior high
school.
TRUE STORY: A friend of mine named David Shor told me that his kids had
an aquarium containing a kind of fish called African cichlids, and one
of them died. So David went to the aquarium store and picked out a
replacement African cichlid, but the aquarium guy said he couldn't buy
that one, and David asked why, and the guy said: ``Because that one is
from a different lake.''
But getting back to my daughter's fish: After much thought, the aquarium
guy was able to find me three totally pacifist fish -- Barney Fife fish,
fish so nonviolent that, in the wild, worms routinely beat them up and
steal their lunch money. I brought these home, and so far they have not
killed each other or died in any way. Plus, Sophie LOVES them. So
everything is working out beautifully. I hope it stays that way, because
I hate zucchini.
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