Body Count

Early last week, my toddler started asking for a pet. Now, my first reaction was to point to our two dogs, but that just brought a pouty "but I want my own pet!" in response. I had to admit, the little rug muffin had a point. Both of our dogs are approaching ten years old, and they've been a part of our (my wife and I that is) lives much longer than my daughter. I'm all for empowerment and whatever new-age psychobabble that people want to attach to a young child's emotional development, so I was open to the idea.

But, we argued, what to get?

Another dog was out, right off the bat. We don't have the space in our house, and frankly I didn't want to start a caninine battle royale by introducing a puppy into a well-defined pecking order of two older dogs. Cats? I'm badly allergic to them and don't like them anyway. Birds, Guinea Pigs, and other small critters were similarly vetoed due to past bad experiences.

Fish? That's an option. After all, how dummy-proof are fish?

I scooped up my daughter, grabbed the checkbook, and headed to the local PetsMart, which is basically WalMart minus the groceries and shotgun shells. While I was looking for durability and ease of maintenance, my daughter's main point of interest seemed to be color. After a little (OK, maybe twenty minutes, which is easily a year in toddler time) dithering, we settled on an orange tropical fish about two inches long.

"OK, you also need to add this, and keep...and...make sure to....and keep this...." The clerk, trying to be helpful without sounding pretentious, droned on about minute details until I had obviously glazed completely the hell over, probably in the same way my Pug does when I explain vector physics to him.

"Umm, it's in the operating manual, right?"

With a couple of perfunctory nods and a little damage to the checking account, we were out the door. Twenty minutes later, we walked in, set up the tank, and started waiting. The instructions said to let the water set for four hours to settle, which I decided was probably some sinister plot to bore the fish to death as he sat there in his plastic bag on the kitchen table. Never one to argue with logical instructions, I waited.

An hour. Reasoning that water settling, or whatever the scientific term for it is, occurs on a reverse exponential scale where the greatest impact is the most immediate, I gently (picture an anchor dropping from a battleship) scooped the fish in, flipped on the filter, tossed in some food flakes, and stood back and watched my toddler oow and aww as much as her attention span would allow. About a minute later, she wandered off, as did I.

The next morning, on the way out the door to work, I peeked in on my still-sleeping munchkin. So silent, so peaceful, I thought, as she lay there wrapped up in her blankets. I tip-toed across the room to peer in the fish tank. Ahhh, I thought, so silent, so peaceful....so dead. Now, it's been twelve years since my last animal-related college biology class, but I do know that doing the horizontal stationary backstroke is generally not a good sign. Not wanting to be less than an hour early to work, I creeped out of the room and left for work. I had made it roughly a mile down the road when my cellphone went off. My normally inflappable wife, actually very flappable before her second cup of coffee, wanted to know why I left a dead fish in the tank.

Excuses I offered, in that order:
1. I didn't want to wake the little one - didn't fly.
2. Running late - didn't work either.
3. Ashes to ashes, dust to.... - nope.
4. I'm allergic to dead fish guts - sorry.
5. Maybe the fish was still sleeping - ummm, no.


Tomorrow - adventures in rodentia.