Austin360 blogs > Globe-Jotting > Archives > 2009 > April > 19 > Entry
Tanked
As I said, dogs have been gamboling around my head lately, fetching errant ideas, chewing up awkward sentences, barking at ill-advised diction and using obscure words as fire hydrants.
Sit. Stay. That’s my latest response to the overwhelming proposition of getting a doggie. Don’t think I want the responsibility, the 15-year commitment. Not yet. I’m not ready for parenthood.
So, on Easter, I got a fish tank. I like fish. I like water. I like creatures that do stuff in large volumes of liquid. It was spontaneous, like that. I am known to be impulsive. What I want, I really want. What I want, I almost always get.
I got it. Twenty-gallons. And now, after a week of incremental population introductions, that big square of heated water teems with 18 fish, two African dwarf frogs and, gross, two aquatic snails that sweep up poo and untoward detritus.
Spending my formative years, 4 through 10, in Santa Barbara, I was around the ocean a lot. The sand and salt. The school field trips on the Pacific, watching grey whales migrate to or from the warm Baja waters. The day camps spent at tide pools. Shell collections. “Jaws.” All of it informed and shaped my Play-Doh brain.
I loved Sea World in San Diego. My favorite stuffed animal was a seal I got there. His name was Salty. I was not an imaginative child.
At one point I actually entertained being a marine biologist. Ha, ho, yes, me doing well in science. A good one, that.
To this day the ocean blows my mind. A while back, here in Austin, which has no coast, as someone informed me, I contemplated taking scuba diving lessons, not entirely unseriously. Partly because I get such a kick out of snorkeling, which I’ve done in Jamaica (disastrous), Thailand (somewhat better despite sun poisoning and coral cuts) and the Florida Keys (paradise).
I yearn to plumb the dark ocean fathoms, explore the watery gloom, meet fish and mammals, hopefully even a shark or, best of all, a mermaid.
My fish are pretty animals, dazzling, tiny neon signs: tetras, guppies, catfish, (including an albino feller), zebra dainos, sunburst wags and Dalmatian mollies that look splattered by Pollock’s brute brush. None, save the mollies, are longer than two inches.
You acquire them to nurture them, and to watch them hypnotically: the frogs and their stretchy, pumping legs; the fish, slashing and knifing the water. Sometimes the various species play and flirt, hector and circle each other.
The frogs have mellowed as new additions have emerged. Once vaulting comets, they are now reclusive, reticent, shy baby boys, tucked in the plants or floating up high by the heater.
I think the frogs are the silliest of them all.
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