The Long Hard Fall of Dingus the Goldfish

"Fish bit me," Max tried to tell me, while I was in the middle of making dinner. 

"OK buddy," I shrugged and continued making my dinner. Max quickly forgot and went on to count all of the oranges in a bowl on the kitchen table. 

A full 10 minutes later I walked past the fish tank on my way to the laundry room and, to my horror, poor Dingus the fish was laying still on the tile, covered in an embarrassing amount of dirt, dust and dog hair. 

OMG, he's dead. 

I yelled for my husband, who casually picked him up and, to our surprise, wriggled a little. 

OMG, he's still alive. 

Dave rinsed him off and placed him back in the fish tank where he continued to wriggle, then floated upside-down for a little, then wriggled some more. Slowly, Dingus the fish started moving more and more, until he was back to his usual buggy-eyed, O-mouthed self. 

It wasn't the first time this week death had crossed our paths. 

A week before, a big, gusty Florida spring storm rolled in and blew a nest full of baby birds out into our front lawn. The poor little guys didn't make it, and I found myself truly upset at their demise. Ironically at the time I was preparing chicken wings for dinner, and the irony of the similarity between the baby birds and the chicken wings did not escape me. 

Thankfully, my son David nonchalantly tended to the baby birds, removing them from our yard and placing them in one of his old sneaker boxes until we could figure out what to do with them. We couldn't bury them, because we were worried that our dog, Xena, may dig them up and eat them. We didn't want to just put them in the trash; that just seemed disrespectful. We opted instead to give them a Viking burial in our fire pit later that evening. 

But back to Dingus the goldfish. 

It didn't take much sleuthing for us to figure out exactly what happened. Dingus wasn't suicidal; he was coaxed out of his tank. 

Perhaps it's my fault for reading him a Little Critter book ("I Was So Mad") in which Little Critter gets upset for not being allowed to tickle the goldfish. Perhaps it was just an inevitable thing any curious little 2-year-old boy would do. 

Either way, our fish tank now has a latching lid, and Max has a new catch phrase … "Never ever touch fish."