Goldfish

I'm listening to Eve Ensler talk about the power of the girl cell, ,and I want you to know that because all I want to talk about this morning is my little fish. That's what the Sanctuary is all about. There's hard work to do, there are hard things to think about, there is ugliness and horror and betrayal all around us, but here in the Armadillo Sanctuary, I spent the morning collecting mosquito larvae to feed the goldfish.

Goldfish are the white mice of the pet world, anonymous and doomed. So ordinary, so commonplace, and this one is an especially unprepossessing specimen. He's the sole survivor of a dozen, scooped randomly out of a feeder tank, 12 for $2.29, purchased to feed to a friend's lungfish, who was staying at the Sanctuary while his people got a new house. One by one the others went comma shaped and stiff, and I'd drop their little carcasses into the lungfish's skanky tank, and although you would never see him move, in moments they were gone. This one lived, though it wasn't the biggest or prettiest. Puny, raggedy, pale gold, with fungus-gnawed fins and a crooked spine from malnutrition, he hung on. He learned to do the feed-me dance whenever I walk by. He's got the bowl all to himself, now. Now, he's my project, like a fish bonsai.

I change his water about every two weeks, scrubbing the sides clean with salt, and I put a big spoonful of celtic sea salt in every water change. That cleared up his fin rot. I feed him bits of peas, spinach, and zucchini, and that has straightened his vitamin-deficient crooked spine. And on my days off I cruise the yard for mosquito larvae, which I painstakingly collect and decant until I've sorted them out from the leaves and debris, then pour into his bowl. I won't deny it's satisfying in a tiny way to feed bugs I hate (wonder if he's big enough to eat shb grubs yet...) to a fish, and he takes his feed-me shimmy to new artistic heights when he sees them coming. He's kind pf pretty now, in an ordinary, maybe archetypal way. Gold-colored and fish-shaped. That sort of pale yellowish no-color has gone a bit richer, a bit more metallic, like brass. He's still only two inches long, but he will devour as many mosquito wrigglers as I can catch, and I like that. It's so eager.

If only everything was that simple.

And by the way, don't miss the Eve Ensler talk. It made my soul do the feed-me dance.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_embrace_your_inner_girl.html