Gone, in a poof!
I pledged to myself after a busy social calendar last month that I would see no one other than Cha this weekend, and it worked out. I did speak to Julio on the phone, and saw Professeur le Cool as we walked by his outdoors Paolo's table Friday night after leaving Kyodai, but other than that we were alone. Cha even begged out of a party her friends were throwing Saturday.
We bought a 30-gallon aquarium on a whim. This started when we were looking at a bamboo plant in the sushi joint--actually several bamboo plants in two levels in one pot, with frogs circling the rim of the pot. We happened to see this same arrangement in the window of a shop called Fairy Tale on York Road, and because we were looking the Chinese proprietor came out and asked us in. "All pottery 50% off!" he said. We were going to get the bamboo pot for Cha's new office at her new job, but then I walked back further and saw they had fish, and then Cha saw a tank of blood parrot fish and she fell in love with them. So we bought an unusual three-gallon tank and I picked out a fat copper-colored goldfish who waddles when he swims and she picked out a pink and orange parrot fish and the proprietors assured us they'd be ok in the tank together. We hauled all this shit down York Road.
We cleaned the tank, filled it a third of the way with water, and then I tried to lift it, intending to put it on our mantel and fill it the rest of the way.
My right hand went through the glass.
Water went everywhere, as did broken glass.
There was a lot of blood, but as I was standing by the kitchen sink, I was able to wrap myself quickly with paper towels.
We cleaned up the mess, put the fish into a small glass salad bowl for the night, and I was able to bandage my two sliced up fingers before going to bed. On Saturday we went to PetSmart and bought a full-fledged aquarium with all the fixin's. This is something I've always wanted to have, and because of her allergies we can't have dogs or cats, and because our bird is so hateful and anti-social we thought: why not get some fish?
This is the sort of lunatic thing childless middle-aged folk do on a whim.
I named my fat goldfish Leviathan, and her parrot fish is Polly (tho it's a male). They get along sometimes, but the parrot fish keeps punching the goldfish in the gills with its nose. We'd built a little outcropping out of a broken stone sculpture and some rocks. The parrot fish dug out the gravel beneath this and built himself a lair. Any time Leviathan roams by, Polly flies out and punches him again and again. This morning I came downstairs to find Cha punishing Polly by holding him against the side of the tank with a net. "He's going to kill Leviathan," she said.
"We shouldn't mix goldfish with tropical. It's our fault." That said, we're both already attached to both fish, after watching them for hours yesterday.
Her fish was $15, mine was $4. We're going to get more next week, but perhaps we should return one and get only compatible types.
