runlindsayrun

Fish Tales

When I was little, we read a lot of books in my house. One that got read a lot was called 'A Fish Out of Water.' It chronicled the life and times of a young boy who bought his first pet fish (Otto) from his friendly neighbourhood pet shop owner (Mr. Carp). Mr. Carp warns him not to feed the fish too much... 'Or something may happen, and you never know what.' Ominous! I'm going to guess that my lifetime preoccupation with not breaking the rules was born somewhere around this time.

Anyway. The boy doesn't listen, bad things happen (Otto grows and grows and grows until he's bigger than a house), Mr. Carp saves the day (and not before getting in a dig about how boys never listen), and the boy learns his lesson about proper care of fish.

I was thinking about this story yesterday, as I poked at the glass on Fish's bowl and realized that he was quite sick. I just cleaned his water a few days ago, but already it was so murky you could hardly see through it. The time had come for drastic measures. I had to save Fish.

Now, the people at Petland tell you to only change about half of the water at a time, but clearly this wasn't really working out so well. So, readers, I did it. I lived on the edge. I took a risk. I poured Fish into a small disposable plastic cup (he was NOT impressed), quickly dumped ALL the water from the bowl, rinsed out the rocks, refilled it with water that I promptly treated, and poured Fish back into his new and improved home - with virtually none of the original water in there.

All day, I was worried that something bad would happen. I was fully expecting him to be doing the dead man's (fish's?) float this morning when I got to work. After all, when the boy didn't listen to Mr. Carp, chaos ensued.

But Fish is happily swimming around, looking better than ever. Which makes me wonder... Could I have gotten away with breaking the rules all this time???

L

posted by Lindsay @ 1:02 PM