ἸΧΘΥΣ

R.I.P. Glenn Gold –

Dec 10, 2020: Tonight my girls and I said goodbye to an old friend.

Seven years ago, my 13-year-old daughter was with some girlfriends at the mall. A group of boys ran up to them, held something out to my daughter, and said, “Here!” Before she knew what had happened, she was holding a plastic bag containing water and a goldfish.

My daughter is an off-the-chart empath. She can’t stand the thought of anyone or anything suffering. She was suddenly the sole guardian of an orphan goldfish. She had ridden the train from home to the mall, and neither her mom nor I was available to drive to pick her up with the fish. She found a pet store and spent what little pocket money she had on a fishbowl and some glass pebbles and brought him home on the train inside her coat. It was winter but she managed to keep him warm. I admired her greatly for the way she followed her heart.

Once she got the fish home, however, it became my responsibility. Not because she wasn’t responsible. She just didn’t know how to care for a fish without killing it in relatively short order. So I took over and Glenn Gold joined our family. We named it Glenn at first without actually knowing the fish’s gender. Eventually I looked it up on the internet: the breeding tubercles on the gills, the vent shape, and the general body conformation all combined to disclose that Glenn was in fact a male. His long, deeply forked tail further differentiated Glenn as a comet goldfish.

Glenn started off in a one-gallon glass jar with some rocks in the bottom. It had previously housed a pet Betta that had died. We put his enclosure on the kitchen counter up against a wall so he would not feel too out in the open and vulnerable. Especially with Billie Jean the cat watching him. Eventually a plastic aquarium plant was added. Goldfish will uproot and destroy most kinds of living aquatic plants. His water needed to be changed frequently to avoid becoming toxic. Oxygenation didn’t seem to be a problem; his jar allowed a broad surface area between water and atmosphere. After a time, we upgraded him to a two-gallon jar, and added more varied rocks and plastic plants for landscaping and hiding places. He didn’t need a heater; room temperature seemed to suit him just fine.

From the start, after the initial harrowing experience of the shopping mall and the light rail transit journey home through winter cold, I became Glenn’s sole caregiver and main companion. I fed him most days. I talked to him. I took care of his habitat, trying to make it pleasant and homey and secure-feeling. I moved him into progressively larger containers, as each one seemed inhumanly confining as a place to spend one’s entire existence, 24/7. When you stop to think about it, comet goldfish have been bred solely in captivity since the late 19th century, so they don’t exactly have a ‘natural’ habitat for them to miss or long for. But still, the one- and two-gallon jars just seemed so small. The last few years of Glenn’s life were spent in a five-gallon aquarium tank. It seemed like a good size for him. I bought him a series of nerite snails, each one named Lightning, for company. They didn’t survive for very long. I didn’t feel substantial grief with any of their passings, as I did with Glenn today.

One of the gifts that Glenn gave me was a different lens to view my relationship with God. I was like God to Glenn, and it made me think about what God is like to me. Glenn was absolutely dependent on me for every single aspect of his existence. If I didn’t bring food to him, food did not come. If I didn’t stay on top of his water quality and change it with adequate frequency, he would slowly poison and die (ask the nerite snails; I think the reason they died was because I didn’t change it often enough for their more delicate constitutions). The quality of his home was determined by what I gave him. If I went away for more than a week or so, his survival depended on my arranging a substitute caregiver. Glenn helped me to relate to how absolutely dependent I am, and have always been, on God.

I often talked to Glenn. I imagined that my voice sounded to him like distant thunder, like some people described the voice of God in the Bible. Deep, muffled, unintelligible, originating somewhere far off, unseen and inaccessible.

Glenn’s existence in that small few gallons of water-space over the seven years he was with us always made me puzzle over the meaning of our lives. Why did Glenn exist? What was the purpose of his living day after day, month after month after month, year after year, in that tiny little space, in that incredibly vulnerable little quantity of water, with no other one of his own kind to see or encounter or interact with? Only me, some incomprehensible giant alien caregiver being. He could see me whenever I came in the room, close to his tank. He would unfailingly swim over to the near side of the aquarium, wriggling frantically against the glass at the waterline, anticipating (begging? pleading? praying?) that I might feed him. Food seemed to be the main focus of his existence. I remembered from days earlier in my youth, when I had kept aquarium fish by choice rather than by having responsibility for one of them thrust upon me, that one of the most common ways people kill pet fish is by overfeeding. Glenn’s appetite for food seemed to know no bounds, and so it also fell upon me to become the arbiter of how much was enough, versus too little or too much. Like God, I had to make the decision to withhold food even though Glenn seemed to want it desperately. Not because he was starving or anything (his abdomen was always convex, and never concave like a fish deprived of adequate calories and nourishment), but just because he seemed programmed to always want more. When he wasn’t actually eating the few little pellets I gave him each day, he was working the tank, every surface and nook and cranny, grazing and grousing, nibbling and tasting, algae-covered surfaces of glass and rock and plastic plants. He seemed forever in motion, with the sole objective of finding food. It made me think about my own incessant state of desiring, seeking, never content for long, always wanting something more, something different, whether food or sex or rest or entertainment or stimulation of one kind or another or material stuff or knowledge. I am almost never content in stillness, real stillness. And yet God has placed me here, in this habitat, this enclosure, this circumstance, surrounded by the water of my life and the rocks and plastic plants. And algae. Lots of algae. What’s it all for? What’s it all about? I do not know.

This morning I came into the kitchen at about 5:40 a.m., as is my usual routine on a workday. I turned on a light, turned on the electric kettle for the coffee, and reached for Glenn’s food. As I shook a small quantity of pellets into my hand to put into his tank, I said to him obliquely, “Glenn, buddy, I do not understand the meaning or purpose of your life, any more than I understand that of my own.” Then I looked and noticed him in an unusual position, apparently motionless at the bottom of the tank wedged between some plastic plant stems. He would usually be wriggling at the surface at the top, wanting food. I knew something was wrong. I got a fork and worked him out from between the stems. He wriggled feebly, gills opening and closing some, but he was not well. He rolled onto his side and plummeted head first to the bottom of the tank, his body flexing in a way that seemed poorly coordinated. He must have lost control of his swim bladder and his buoyancy. I scooped him up near the surface using a large plastic serving spoon. He couldn’t hold himself steady, or control his movements well, and his breathing seemed laboured. I let him settle down to the bottom again. I worried that I’d let the water go too long without changing it (though he had looked fit as a fiddle the night before, showing none of the signs of an aquarium fish in distress). So I removed about half the tank’s water and replaced it with fresh. I had a slim hope that this might be enough to revive him. But really, it looked pretty grim for Glenn. Or could it be good? What is the end of our life on this Earth? Is it bad? Do we cease to exist? Or is it a transition, every bit as natural as our birth on the other end? Where do we go? To a better place? To a higher existence? To the next phase of some larger life cycle and trajectory of development that transcends the narrow window of our existence that we can perceive now between what we call our birth and death?

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

John 12:24-25

Is it the same or different for goldfish?

“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.”

Luke 12:6

Glenn, buddy, you taught me so much, or at least you caused me to reflect. You were a beautiful creature. One thing I liked to do sometimes was take slow-motion video of you swimming in your tank, sunlight shining through your translucent orange fins, reflecting off your silvery-orangey scales, your diaphanous tail rippling behind you. It made me wonder if God looks at us and sees some similar kind of beauty. Does he watch us and marvel, even though we don’t even really know he’s there? We think we are so smart, so clever, but really we’re just grazing and grousing and nibbling, constantly moving, never still, always searching for something more to consume, thinking we’re fending for ourselves when in fact we are under the care of something incomprehensible that monitors and attends to our needs, even when we think we are deprived.

Tonight I transferred Glenn’s earthly remains into a clean Atlas Mason jar with a quantity of his water. His little body was starting to stiffen, but his eyes had not clouded and his scales and fins were yet glorious in their subtle hues and reflectivity. My girls and I, all now seven years older, took him down to the rocky sea shore in near-black darkness. My elder daughter, now 22, said she had never seen the tide so low. I know it’s silly, but I felt like the sea had purposefully receded to beckon us as close to her depth as we could come to release Glenn’s slippery, stiffening little gilded husk. We travelled by a combination of LED headlamp and smart phone light. The rocks, too, were slippery, treacherously so. Our little pallbearing procession picked and groped our way in jerky slow-motion over jagged outcrops festooned with glistening algae and seaweed and barnacles. Pools of tidal residue cradled anemones and other less-identifiable mysteries. We were between worlds. The sea was unexpectedly calm. We drew as close as we could to the edge. The outcrop fell away sharply before us. The night was very dark, and the LED beam from the headlamp was very bright, and the cold northern sea water was exceptionally clear, sparklingly clear. It surged, insistent and gently unstoppable, up and back and up and back through the miniature fjords and canyons of the promontory, over a bottom of gravel and shell, in sharp focus, magnified by the crystal water. We said unrehearsed words, in no particular order, and half ceremoniously poured Glenn’s body out and in. The sea water was so clear, and the LED beam so bright and white, and Glenn’s scales so glittering and shiny and silvery-orangey reflective, moving to and forth in the small swell. He surged up and back. At one point it seemed he would be lifted up and left on the rocks, but then he was pulled back out and further down. He descended to a place hard to see, and it felt like he had gone. And it felt right. We turned and picked and groped our way back to the firmament.

Dec 11, 2020: Early this morning I came into the kitchen again, same as yesterday, to make coffee. There was Glenn’s tank, as usual, still full of water, the lid off to the side as I had left it the night before when I extricated his small corpse. I felt the absence of his presence more than you might expect, or at least more than I might have thought I would expect, for such a small and by some standards common and unspectacular goldfish. But I had come to know him, perhaps as much as you can know a specific, individual goldfish, watching him long enough and enough times that I had seen past his common plainness. I had seen his spectacularness, hidden in plain view. Sometimes you just have to watch closely enough and long enough, and there it is. Now his absence was there, palpable, like a thing. No more “Glenn, buddy…” No more feeling like a beneficent deity dropping pellet-manna into his watery little food desert. No more wondering if and when it would be time to change his water again, or if I should get him a new snail companion, or clean some algae off his glass. I felt some pangs of sadness, missing the little guy, feeling the thing-ness of his absence. I went to work, got on with my day, and for the most part didn’t even think about him more than a few times. Then, at the end of the day, arriving home, in the kitchen, there it was still. No-Glenn.

Tomorrow is the weekend. I will need to bite the bullet and pour the water out of his tank, clean out the algae, and rinse off and decide what to do with the rocks and plastic plants. What to do with the tank. It will feel strange. And all this from a random, selfish, immature, obnoxious, teenage prank, played on an unsuspecting young girl who couldn’t say no to a fellow creature in trouble. It seemed like a bad thing, a major annoyance, and an inconvenience. It turned out to be a gift.