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A fish called Hippolyta

In which our fatalistic Southern man contemplates life and death in a fishbowl – as well as out of it.

Do goldfish get lonely. Do they pine? It’s an important question, but my only concern is whether this is the place to ask it. The editor, you see, has a policy of purity. Many’s the time I have heard her exclaim, even while applying another coat of Carmine by Dior to those incomparable fingernails of hers, that within the covers of a gardening magazine there should be nothing but gardening. And who could argue? Not I, for one.

So at first blush it seems that the touching story of Taylor, Hippolyta, Unanimous and Jack, the four little goldfish I rescued from a stifling de-oxygenated bowl after a corporate event where they had functioned merely – would you believe it? – as table decoration, with no thought to their disposal afterwards, belongs not here but in Aquarium News. Goldfish are not gardening.

There is greenery in the tank I provided them with, but that greenery is plastic. The goldfish do not mind, having swum happily around and through the plastic plants these last 10 years or so, but I am not sure that an incidental reference to artificial waterweed is sufficient for this story, however touching, to pass the editor’s purity test.

Yet it is touching. Goldfish are undemonstrative creatures, but these four recognised me as their benefactor. Whenever I approached their roomy tank they came as one to nuzzle at the glass, and whenever I sprinkled food, they rose to suck it down with a serenity that smacked of gratitude.

Two years ago, Jack died. He must have been eight or nine years old which is a fine age for a goldfish and I buried him beneath that favourite of all my shrubs, the magnolia. The following spring, it bloomed more luxuriantly than it had ever bloomed before. Coincidence? Perhaps so, but then again, Jack the fish will have rotted down and the molecules that constituted him will have been sucked up through the magnolia’s roots and incorporated into its vegetable flesh, into those unearthly waxy petals, those fine strong leaves. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, says the physicist. All flesh is grass, sayeth the preacher. And Jack the fish is matter, Jack the fish is flesh, so why should he not lie within the covers of a gardening magazine?

Unanimous was the next to go, departing this earth, like W.B. Yeats, in the dead of winter. I buried her beside the ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ that the possum ravaged and that needs all the help it can get. From fish to fruit.

And then just a few short weeks ago, the lovely Taylor went. She will look good as blossom on the flowering cherry.

Now only Hippolyta remains; Hippolyta of the pale complexion and the ghostly gossamer fins. But having outlived her three companions she is alone in the tank, and she has fallen into what seems like a depression.

She is an old fish now and hangs almost motionless for hour on hour and stares into a corner of the tank. Does she see the ghosts of her life-long companions there? Is she lonely? Or is she just dimly sensing the journey she shall shortly undergo? The garden calls her; she cannot say no.

MAN’S WORLD

en-nz

2022-01-01T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-01T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuffmagazines.pressreader.com/article/283244511290312

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