Tuna Girl, who is one of my favorite web loggers, wrote a touching message yesterday about the death of her daughter’s pet fish.

It all came rushing back.

I was about ten when, for some insane reason, my parents allowed me to add to the menagerie of creatures that already inhabited our house and adopt five goldfish, which I immediately named after Star Wars characters. Never having owned fish before, I was both inexperienced in their care and unprepared for their intense reaction to the slightest change in conditions. No sooner did Luke Skywalker emerge from his plastic bag than he began floating on his side, wagging his listless fins.

Devastated, I followed fish protocol and separated him from the rest of the school, lest he prove contagious. My mother put him on a pot on the stove along with (for some reason) an aspirin, and my father forced me to go to my catechism class when I wanted nothing more than to sit by Luke Skywalker’s sickbed (sickpot?) and restore his health through constant watchfulness and sheer force of will. That, I reasoned, is what Jesus would have wanted. But apparently, Jesus’s affinity for fishes extended only as far as loaves, because by the next morning, the first Jedi fish had gone to that big Ocean in the Sky.*

An unwatched pot never cures an ailing fish.

I buried Luke with much fanfare in an aspirin bottle and secretly planted a tulip bulb in his grave with the idea that its blooming would be viewed as miraculous testament to his aquatically sainted nature.

But by the time it sprouted, I had forgotten all about him, and as Princess Leia, Darth Vader, and the rest went belly up, they got flushed down the toilet.

This was the story of one fish and how he did not do much to hinder the loss of innocence of the boy who loved him.


* Incidentally, I realize now how adorably ignorant I was: goldfish are fresh-water fish and cannot tolerate the salinity of an ocean, heavenly or otherwise. But at least we can hope it found a bigger tank and all the flakes it could eat.