County Fair and the Goldfish that Wouldn’t Die.
One day, lo these many years ago, a girlfriend and I attended a county fair. “let’s toss ping pong balls at goldfish” she said. “it’ll be fun. We could win a goldfish!” So i fork over a buck and she misses with all three balls, to a whispered “YESSS!!” from me. “Oh, let me try again!!” SO I fork over another and she gets not one but TWO goldfish, in tiny little glass bowls the size of softballs. “I’ll keep one and you keep one” she says. ugh. So I take said goldfish home. And proceed to neglect it. It thrives.
I figure it’s going to be dead in a couple days but it’s still swimming around in it’s bowl a week later, so I go get a small sample packet of fish food. I feed it for a month, and it still lives. I never change the water in it’s bowl. I add water when it needs it by taking ice cubes out of my diet coke. By the end of two months I’ve broken up wiht said girlfriend, who at the time tearfully told me HER goldfish had died. I offered to give her mine but she says ‘don’t you want anything to remember me by?” SO i keep it. Through two jobs, three apartments. The bowl now has a coating of green on the inside. I rinse out a glass and pour the fish in it, scour out the bowl with a brillo pad, more or less rinse it out, throw in the fish. Put some chlorinated tapwater in with it. I feed it every day, and it begins to grow, slowly, and I eventually end up putting it in a deep casserole. No gravel. No teeny castles. No plants. No nothing, just the fish and some water. I go away on vacation, I come back,the casserole has dried almost completely out, the fish mummified and nasty, I take it to the sink and rinse it out, and the GODDAMNED FISH STARTS SWIMMING AROUND AGAIN. I sit it on the counter in the kitchen and occasionally accidentally drop toast into the dish, and the fish lives on. I rescue the fish from the neighbor’s cat’s mouth, and after a couple days of bleeding from pinprick sized bite marks, the fish is as hale and hearty as ever. Fully two years elapse before I finally find a lake and set it free, where it now, I’m sure, is the size of a buick and will eat me for my past sins should I ever set foot in said body of water.
Speaking of fish and buicks:
In 1969 I was ten years old, riding my green Flexible Flyer down the road circling Cedar Lake Indiana. Cedar lake had been a cesspool for many years, and carp were it’s most plentiful inhabitants. To try to tone down the carp population, the locals went out and dialed up some fish. For anyone who don’t know this, you take a little hand-cranked generator, the type you find in old telephones. You take this out into your (wooden) boat and drop a couple lines over the edge, turn the crank vigorously, and gaff and billy the fish that float to the surface, all around the boat. THis goes on for days. Anyway, I’m riding my bike and see this buick Electra deuce and a quarter withit’s trunk open, the head of a carp hanging out one side, the tail hanging out the other. Easily seven feet long. In little cedar lake!! I was stunned. The fish, however, wasn’t, or wasn’t as much as I’d have desired- I reached out to touch it and it snapped at my fingers. I pedalled furiously all the way home, my jeans soaked with urine. Damned fish.
We bought a bunch of comet goldfish as feeders for a slider turtle…. Well, the turtle never ate about three so the goldfish stayed when we donated the turtle to a rescue group. That was 8+ years ago. We lost one of the trio four years ago, the second three years ago but Lazarus hung on until late last year. He was alone in a 10 gallon take, sucker was almost a foot long and must have weighed three pounds… We went on a three week road trip and left the fish with a 7-day feeder cube. The bugger was thinner but still active when we came back. I thought I was going to have to gaff him to get the thing out of the house….
My old roommate had 3 goldfish that started out as feeders and EASILY became the size of a large man’s palm. The fish are 10 years old and still kicking it. Who knows?
Maybe an urban legend — whatever — I read somewhere that carp are immortal. Biological inertia incarnated. If not acted on by an outside force, they will go on forever, swimming and growing.
It’s sort of like Methuselah’s Daughter. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It’s a neat story.
So long as you don’t tell Oprah.
M
Mark, I think you’re probably right. I’ve seen carp scales the size of hubcaps, which would imply a twenty-footer at least. Damned good thing they can’t live in salt water, huh?
I have never, EVER, seen a gold fish last more then 8 months.
You have to hate them, contagion. If you love them they die. I think they thrive on hatred.
Alternately, stop feeding them to your pirhanas.
Dimsdale!
Bulletproof goldfish, mmm, who’d have figured?
I bought a half dozen goldfish to throw into a fountain in my backyard about 7-8 years ago. They’ve done just fine, with no significant feeding on my part. They eat the algae and assorted bits of crap that fall into the fountain. Now this last few months they up and *reproduced*!! There’s at least twenty goldfish of varying sizes in there now.
Don’t let the raccoons know, cat.