(Today, this Blog answers a reader’s question. Have a question? Leave it in a comment or whisper it to yourself obsessively, over and over again, while using public transportation.)
Once I had a pond with enormous goldfish, bright, almost luminous, orange and left on their own for the past decade or more. But at age 5, I had bought them and thrown them in the water, and so they were mine forever. Every morning, I peppered the pond with fish flakes and, now and then, tended to the aerating pump and raked the silt that would gather at the bottom. Soon enough, though, my interest waned. The pond iced over in the winter, and in the summer neighbors’ dogs flopped in to cool off and swipe at the fish. Eventually the pump broke, and I left home and so stopped cleaning out the dead leaves, sticks, and other muck in the spring and the fall. But the goldfish grew and multiplied, which I could (and did, several times) observe from the kitchen window. Their perseverance was a regular topic among the extended family on holidays. Relatives who lived 5, 10 minutes from the pond would ask me about the fish, me who lived 500 miles away and just got in at 3 AM that morning and had been asleep until 45 minutes ago. “The fish are well,” I would say, assuming it to be true. Sometimes I would check the pond the next day to be sure–poke at the ice or swirl a stick in the water until an orange blur sped away to greater depths. Away from home, the fish never crossed my thoughts, but I always knew that they were there–if you had asked me, that would have been the instant answer. About a year ago, my parents sold the house with the pond. My father told me a few months later, after I’d forced myself to broach the matter, that he saw a flash of orange dart through the murky brown water the day that they left. So yes, in all likelihood, I have a pet. Several, in fact.
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