The other day, my sister and her daughter were here, visiting from the Midwest. My niece and I were looking at our aquarium, and my sister said, “Oh, no, don’t you get any ideas! I don’t need any more trouble.”
They have two dogs and a cat or two, and my sister doesn’t need any more pets that take up her time.
I felt the same before we got the first fish. He was a betta named Oktten (named by our then five-year-old because his long tendrils resembled an octopus — the spelling was all hers!). He was a zippy little guy till winter came, and I found out that (why am I surprised by this?) the pet store “sold us a bill of goods” about the fact that bettas are happy or even healthy in one of those tiny “betta kits” they sell. First of all, bettas like to swim and those tanks are tiny. Second, their native water is eighty degrees.
It got to eighty degrees at our house once. I’m sure I remember that happening. Of course, it’s a vague memory given that I’m sitting here in the fog shivering in a hoodie in August!
On average, the temperature in our house ranges from 58 (where the thermostat is set) to seventy on a good day. Poor Oktten was never happy after the weather turned cold. We actually thought he was dead because he was floating on his side, but when I went to dump him out, he flapped his fins weakly.
So feeling guilty about our torturing a poor, defenseless fish, I agreed to get a bigger, heated tank. Oktten perked up immediately after we put him in. He raced from side to side! He went down and explored the tunnels in the sea glass at the bottom of the tank. He ate well for the first time in ages.
Then one day, a week later, he didn’t come out of the tunnel he’d gone into. We thought he was hiding, but it turned out that Oktten was a victim of an industrial accident: tumbling seaglass. No more betta.
So we went back to the pet store and got, at their recommendation, a pair of platies and a pair of tetras. Easy fish. They all zoomed around the tank happily, ate heartily, and kept out of those rocks. Success! Last week we added a Thai glass catfish, some different tetras, and an African dwarf frog named Pico. The ten-year-old named that one, and we think that we’ve named the Thai catfish “laab” because that’s one of our favorite Thai dishes (catfish salad).
The six-year-old has given the rest of the fish an ever-shifting roster of colorful, rhyming names, things like floopie and flippie. She was dismayed that I wouldn’t allow her to name one poopie. Oh, how things change between the ages of five and six!
So far there have been no further industrial accidents. All the fish eat heartily; the frog makes leaps for brine shrimp occasionally. We’ve read that he really wants live bait like mealworms. He’s going to have to wait on that. Our cats get live food, but they procure it themselves. Once we had a couple of fence lizards that survived cat attacks in our terrarium, and I finally set them free after getting sick of buying them more and more crickets. They were happy in our house, though. Inside our house is warmer than outside, at least.
“I hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp
that’s why the lady is a tramp!”
I never quite got why hating California made her a tramp, but I understand the sentiment. There are entire months where nothing in our house really dries out.
But at least we have happy fish, and I’m happy, too. I have perhaps been the one most entranced with them, sitting there and watching their antics, contemplating the belly of our female platie, wondering whether we are soon going to have a tank full of them. Better than TV.
When I was a child we had an aquarium. My sister says my mother ended up doing all the work on it — I don’t remember. I do remember watching the fish. And I can still remember the smell of the feed store (this was the MIdwest; it was a real feed store!) where we bought the fish. I remember wandering in that dark aisle looking at all the exotic little beings from far corners of the earth. Nothing so beautiful as an angelfish seemed to be native to where I lived. We had big, ugly catfish in the river, and the occasional trout. The exotic fish were like looking at the photo of pampas grass in the Burpee seed catalog. Oh, how I wanted that grass! I knew it wouldn’t grow in Michigan, and I ended up ordering zinnias and petunias just like every year, but I dreamed of that grass.
Yes, it is cold and damp (at least my corner of it is), but I do love California. And I love our little fish. So far, I don’t mind the work of changing their water and feeding them. I hope we don’t have any more industrial accidents, or any of the other hazards that their little world may encounter. Taking care of defenseless creatures is a big job, but I think we’re up for it.
