Fish
Monday, September 15th, 2008
Seldom does any section in a department store hold childrens’ attention as well as the toy aisles. But for our kids, the fish tanks are a major attraction.
The back-lit boxes stuffed with psuedo-seaweed and mock treasure fascinates them not necessarily because of the beautiful whipping tails and booping mouths that bubble with life, but also the lifeless bodies that swirl around randomly and at odd angles, running face first into glass, lodging in fake plants and aerators.
Our youngest child, who will turn three next week, has learned much about death in the pet aisle. She took me by the hand tonight to show me a tank at her eye level. As I stooped, I heard her whisper, “See, it’s dead.”
And, it was.
There was use in shielding her from the sadness on obvious display with an innocent mistruth. The truth has a way of presenting itself sometimes, and it rose to my lips instantly, as if I’d already been caught in an unspoken fib and needed to come forward to clarify something long misunderstood. “Yes, it’s dead.”
No bigger than my pinky and aswirl in orange and white, the fish spun against the bottom of the tank on its eye. I wondered, then, how well they are taken care of here, but then remembered I’d never seen an employee tending to them unless a customer had purchased one and stood waiting for the net to scoop up the right fish. But it’s not the care that kills most of these fish, it’s the poor breeding that leads to sickly, short lives as miserable as the final deaths they die.
This little fish, I suppose, didn’t die in vain. My daughter noticed it and it was enough for me to think of the value our society puts on life (or the lack thereof.) That fishes life, because it is tiny amd quiet and can be recreated, is nearly worthless and is treated so, not as the tiny package of life it truly is. My little girl, as tiny as she was when was born, was no less precious then because of her size than she is now. Maybe at her age, she’ll learn to grow up to care for all types of life and actually do something about the smaller ones that can’t protect themselves and the best they can hope for is to be noticed, in death, to pass on a hard lesson to be learned.
December 20th, 2008 7:51 pm
That was truly lovely. Just for that, I’m going to send you a little Christmas present. I just discovered these guys yesterday:
http://www.kolzimra.com/?fuseaction=home
Never in my life have I heard such beautiful harmonies. They are awesome. And their site design is very clever.
Now,it’s funny how I happened to land on them. When I looked up “Indecision 2009″, I found, in addition to the article by Michael Mackie, there was another article with the same title by Alex Katz, a student journalist at Stanford. In an attempt to find something else that he’d written, I googled his name.
Alas, because of the wildly adored artist by the same name, finding information on any lesser known Alex Katz was next to impossible- but I persevered. To make a long story short, once you tailor your search in ways that tend to filter out THE Alex Katz, you find out that there are in fact several notable Alex Katz’s in the world. This one is a real gem.
December 24th, 2008 8:55 am
Wow … a present? Thank you! Their voices are truly marvelous. Who would have expected them to cover Green Day?