Our Fish

Sunday our goldfish died. This would usually be considered normal behavior for a goldfish, since most die within a few days after being brought home. One day they are flittering around in their little bowl and the next they are floating upside down on the surface. No one is surprised. Our goldfish, however, was about eight years old when it died, and had grown to be a real pet.

My wife and I live in a small condominium with our children. Someone wanted goldfish, so we went to the pet store to get some. A store clerk scooped out three goldfish with a green net and put them in a plastic bag full of water. I bought a bowl for them for about ten dollars. The fish cost eighteen cents each. There were two orange ones and a gray one, each about one inch long. As I held the bag before my face, I couldn't help marveling at the tiny living beings.

Unfortunately, within a week, the gray one and one of the orange ones had died. Our daughter named the surviving orange goldfish "Swishy". He was a handsome fish, the top half of him a vivid orange, his bottom half mother-of-pearl white, and he was very energetic, swimming back and forth constantly. I changed the water in the fishbowl every week and fed him a small amount twice daily. Swishy outgrew the half-gallon fishbowl, and I bought him a gallon bowl. He outgrew the gallon-sized bowl, and I bought him a five-gallon aquarium.

After two years, Swishy had grown to be three inches long. Before we left on a weeklong vacation to Vermont, I bought a timed-release fish food pyramid. A small pang of concern nagged at me. I had fallen a little behind in the water changes, and his water was a little cloudy. But I changed the filter unit, dropped in the pyramid, and comforted myself that he would probably be okay. If he died, I would have to give him a proper burial. My daughter had made me promise not to flush him. But if he died, he died. After all, he was only a goldfish.

When we returned from vacation, Swishy had a big cut on his head and was swimming erratically. Since he was an aggressive eater, I suspected that he had injured himself on a sharp edge of the pyramid. He did not look well, and I felt terrible. I visited a web site (www.Tetra.co.uk) that discouraged direct medication, but suggested that clean water was the best medicine. Energized with guilt, I changed his water every four hours, around the clock. In the middle of the night, my wife woke and saw me stroking the outside of the tank with my finger, trying to comfort the poor fish.

To my great relief, he made a full recovery. We bought a better filter for his tank. He grew and grew. He began to recognize me as the person who fed him. When I came into the room, or spoke, he would put his mouth in the corner of the aquarium and violently thrash his tail, often splashing water out of the tank until I came over and fed him. If he wasn't particularly hungry, he would swim back and forth in a figure-eight pattern across the tank, or stop, seeming to regard me, his spiky dorsal fin raised like a bird's crest. My children's friends often stood memorized when they came to visit, watching the mammoth goldfish in his little tank.

A combination of economics and space constraints kept him in the 5-gallon tank on the kitchen counter for several years. He grew to be about six inches long, and very fat. His scales glittered like armor plates, and his eyes swiveled to regard visitors outside his tank. His once small, round mouth developed into a formidable sucking apparatus of hard cartilage. I sympathized as he swam to and fro in a tank in which he could barely turn around. Sometimes he became agitated, and dashed back and forth, bumping into the glass.

At last we bought a twenty-five-gallon tank. Following the pet store's instructions carefully, I let the water stand in the tank with the filter running for twenty-four hours before beginning the transfer process. Then I siphoned a gallon of water from Swishy's old tank and half a gallon of water from the new tank into a blue plastic bucket, and scooped him out of his tank and into the bucket. We all stood around, amazed at how he filled the two-and-a-half gallon pail. After half an hour of acclimatization, I picked up the bucket and dumped him into the new aquarium.

He plunged down almost to the bottom and leveled off. With a flick of his tail, he coasted to one end of the tank and stopped, his mouth against the glass. Using his small front fins like little hands, he paddled slowly backwards an inch or two, then turned, flicked his tail, and coasted slowly, luxuriously, all the way to the other end. Then he rose, slowly, straight up, until his dorsal fin broke the surface. He was obviously very pleased.

When algae began to cloud the glass, I bought an algae-eating fish, called a pleco, to keep it clean. Swishy didn't quite know what to make of his new roommate and the pleco, who we named "Spot," was terrified of Swishy, but after a few weeks they seemed to come to an understanding. Once Swishy determined that Spot wasn't good to eat, he was no longer interested. Spot was only interested in sucking on the glass. Swishy's relationship with Spot eventually developed into something like friendship. Sometimes they took turns chasing each other around the tank.

Both Swishy and Spot continued to grow, Swishy to about 8 inches long and Spot to about six. They complemented each other nicely - the dark, reclusive Spot juxtaposed with the flamboyant, sparkling Swishy. Swishy was always the star of the show and I never hesitated to show him off.

"Look at our goldfish," I told our visitors.

"Impressive," they replied.

I enjoyed lying on the couch, watching the fish. Both my wife and I still find fish observation very relaxing. Something about the fluid motion of a fish in its element is soothing to the soul. Watching the aquarium, I could forget all about the dry-land world.

Swishy's tail-thrashing hunger behavior mellowed considerably. Perhaps he thought he should behave in a manner more becoming to his new abode. He acquired a new hobby: sifting the gravel at the bottom of the tank. He would suck several small stones into his mouth and spit them out, take several more and spit them out, and so on. While he pursued this hobby, he swam head down, driving his mouth into the gravel in a slow rhythm.

Because he swam head-down while sucking gravel, I took no real notice when he began to remain more or less stationary in the tank, angled head-downward, gently waving his tail to keep his position for long periods of time. He had often engaged in strange-seeming behavior. I thought he was entertaining himself. But on Sunday I found him, almost dead, upside down and jammed into the plastic plant in the corner of the aquarium. I hurriedly tried to revive him by giving the aquarium multiple water changes, and he did revive slightly, swimming blindly into the wall, into the plant, into Spot. But finally he settled head-down at the bottom of the tank, his gills motionless, and he was dead.

I went on the Internet and found that Swishy had probably had a swim bladder infection. The swim bladder is an organ located just beneath the spine that fish inflate or deflate to control their position and attitude in the water. The infection had apparently progressed and finally killed him.

As a family, we took Swishy to our plot at the Community Gardens and buried him in a shoebox surrounded by rocks to protect him from animals. (Flushing would have been out of the question even if I had considered it. He would certainly have clogged the toilet.) We all said goodbye, and told him he had been a good fish.

Afterward we immediately went to the pet store and bought five new fish. They seem to have adjusted well to Swishy's former home. Spot seems rattled, hiding more than usual and then dashing out, only to dash back into hiding again. He's the big fish in the tank, now. The new fish are hyperactive, multicolored, and each about an inch long. I remarked to someone yesterday that we're still about three inches short.

That's how I feel: three inches short of full in the fish department. I'll always envision Swishy, dorsal fin raised like a question, great, fan-like translucent tail waving and flowing. I saved him twice, but the hat trick was not to be. I think he had a good life. Certainly he had a long one, on average, for his species, although the pet store said he could have lived to be eighteen inches long and fifty years old. I would have liked growing old with him. He was good company.