The Big Bad Blue Fish Guards

As gift-giving season looms on the horizon, I look back at a post written around my youngest daughter’s sixth birthday. What to get her? At a certain point, the options dwindle, and creativity looms in the annals of her father’s past.

What about Teddy bears? She’s got too many. New clothes? Yes, she needs them but there’s nothing tantalizing about opening a three-pack of Old Navy long sleeves. Bracelet construction kit? No, those things have more beads and trinkets than a hippie flea market. I’ve ruined at least six vacuum cleaners sucking up all the pink, blue, yellow, and white fragments of adornment. Right before they peter out, the machines sound like a space shuttle trying to take off without any fuel. How about books? Children’s books? Sure, always a good, safe bet. Last year she received a box with my worn-out Bernstein Bears collection inside. She looked at me like I’d handed her a dog turd. I think it was the dilapidated covers and pages, some of them completely missing or torn in half. I’m happy to report she’s since warmed to them, and we read them most nights.

The thing about birthdays is that they should be inspiring to not only the receiver but the giver. This is a tough task, especially when the age gap creeps upwards of three decades. So, when I thought about a fish tank, I was excited and enthusiastic. This will be a gift we all can enjoy! I thought. That’s the other thing about birthdays: as parents, it’s our chance to redeem our own disasters and explore new frontiers. We get to relive our childhoods and correct the disappointments. So, I admit, I was selfishly giddy at the idea of getting another fish tank.

I had several as a kid. They started small and simple. A single goldfish; a Siamese fighting fish. You know the ones. They look like they have sheets for fins, and they come in wonderful colors and they’re all contained in cute, suffocating oval jars. Bettas, they’re officially named. I had lots of wild fish too. My friends and I were always catching perch or bass or crappie and sometimes we’d keep one instead of eating it. My buddy Corey was the undisputed king of wild fish tanks. He must have had a dozen tanks in his house and at any given time they were filled with largemouth bass or bullhead catfish or pumpkinseed perch. Going over to his house was like walking under water. And the fish didn’t fade with domesticity. They held their wild colors. Later, he’d let them back into whatever body of water they came from, only wanting to study the creatures, never to subjugate them. He did this not only with fish but with turkeys, quail, pheasants, and geese. No doubt a deer or a fox, if given a chance.

I had the exotic stuff too. I remember when I was in junior high, my friend Kyle and I thought it would be cool to build the ultimate aquarium. We bought the biggest the store had - a seventy-five-gallon beauty. We filled it eagerly and spent months stocking it, saving every dollar we could and splurging on Oscars, Plecostomus, guppies, Bala sharks, swimming frogs, snails, neons, tetras, angelfish; everything we could find that looked extravagant and eye-catching. It was as if we were on some hidden camera episode of “Pimp My Fish Tank” and we were trying like hell to win. I even bought a dragon-looking eel. It was white with a black stripe and gills that flared when he snaked through the bottom of the tank rocks. He looked like one of Khaleesi’s dragons from Game of Thrones, only smaller and with gills. And white. And without wings. Shit, maybe it looked nothing like one of Khaleesi’s dragons, but I was proud of that eel! And we were both proud of our masterpiece. Kyle came over two or three times a week to feed the fish and admire all that we had created.

Then one day when I was gone, Dad decided to do me a favor and clean the tank. He delicately scooped out each finned treasure and placed them into bowls. Then he studiously brushed and scrubbed the large glass walls after removing all the rocks, plastic scuba divers, and fake coral. Only he forgot to thoroughly rinse out all the blue Dawn dish soap he gluttonously lathered over all of God’s creation. When he filled it back up and dumped the fish in, they all died. He had good intentions, I think, and looking back, it was an uncommon random act of kindness. Nevertheless, every fish croaked. Even my prized dragon eel. I remember him being somewhat flippant as if it were all some arbitrary act of nature’s cruelty.

“Shit, I’m sorry son. I’ll buy ya some new ones,” or something like that. He never did and I didn’t ask. That was the end of my exotic aquarium days.

Fast forward twenty years and I find myself in PetSmart admiring the various guppies and goldfish. My daughter’s birthday was the next day and I, in my usual procrastinating ways, figured we could simply drive to the store, buy a small tank, bag the fish and mix them all together when we got home. Just like we did when I was a kid. Walla! Birthday fish magic! But I soon found myself accosted by the short, young, polo-wearing fish guards known as PetSmart associates. They looked identical, regardless of sex. Maybe it was the blue collared shirts or the matching black pants, but they all seemed to wear glasses and be of similar height, all with short black hair, dirty sneakers, and silver belt buckles. And they all looked like they loved Harry Potter very much or at least looked up to those who did. I figured once my daughter pointed at a tank and said, “that one,” that would be it. We’d get our fish and go home. But no. I was soon peppered with questions by the blue fish guards, or B.F.G’s as I’ve come to know them.

“How big is your tank?”

“How many fish are you buying?”

“Which ones are you looking at specifically?”

“Have you ever owned an aquarium before?”

“Are you familiar with new tank disease?”

“Have you acclimated your tank?”

“Do you have the proper filter?”

“Do you know how many cubic inches of living space a Plecostomus requires?”

  What the hell? This wasn’t the way I remembered it. I was being asked more questions than a government application for employment at a nuclear testing facility. My daughter, innocent and eager, had pointed to two of the black and white ones and two of the orange ones. Just bag the mother fuckers and let’s go home, I thought. I’m getting hungry and I’m sure the dog has pissed in the laundry room by now. But no. The B.F.G’s told me no! They told me I wasn’t allowed to buy those specific fish in that specific quantity because my fish tank wasn’t “appropriate living space” for that specie. (I had foolishly answered incorrectly to the first question.) They told me the orange ones were aggressive and that they couldn’t be mixed with the black and white ones, a rather intolerant viewpoint, I thought. Then they educated me on all matters of cubic swimming space as it related to guppy survivability in direct proximity to bloodfin tetras. I became dizzy and ardent. I thought I was here to spend money. Did they not want my money? Were my pockets filled with Loonies and Toonies? I thought this was a place that sold fish to people that wanted to buy fish. And where I came from, the true test for livability in a home fish tank was to plop the bastards inside and see what happened. If they were still kicking the next day, you had it made. But no. Now there were calculations and behavioral statistics and water temperature ranges and aggressive vs docile relationships. The B.F.G’s made it sound like I was selecting a surrogate birth mother, not picking up a few fish for the home aquarium.

Now, to their credit, maybe they were just doing their job and doing it well. They obviously cared for the fish they were about to let go. They were no doubt knowledgeable, or at least, they did an excellent job sounding like they were. But I can’t say they were helpful. They acted like it was a privilege to allow me the honor of purchasing one of their prized fish - as if they were the sole pimpled-faced gatekeepers of all living leviathans. It pissed me off. This shouldn’t be the way this goes, I thought. I should have simply caught a couple of rainbows out of the local pond and put them in a bucket. They would have been much more interesting, hardier, and we could have wrapped them in tin foil if they rolled belly up. A win-win, in my book. But looking down into those beautiful brown eyes, it was clear my daughter wanted the shiny little suckers. And I admitted to myself that it was possible I was turning arrogant in age and simply didn’t want to take instruction from Todd, the adamant and pushy twenty-something with no social skills save what he’d accumulated with the speckled water monkeys in his single bedroom apartment.

So, I lied. I told the collared hobbits that I had a fifty-gallon aquarium at home when really, my oldest daughter had a 5-gallon starter kit tucked under her arm behind us. By then, she and her sister were looking at me like I had my shirt off at a black-tie event. When the B.F.G’s asked me where I purchased my fifty-gallon tank (yes, I thought it was an intrusive question also for ten bucks an hour) I told them I bought it used on e-bay. I told them I knew everything about new aquarium disease or whatever the hell it was. I told them anything I had to in order to get out the door with the four little guppies so we could go home and have dinner and go to bed.

When did bringing creatures into your home become a rigid, highly selective pass-or-fail test? Shouldn’t we be allowed to sort some of this out on our own? The exotic pet world is a different animal and I understand that. But for my money, I’d rather catch a largemouth and either A) let it go, B) eat it, or C) keep it for a while and study it before choosing A or B. But the pet world blends into an odd concoction of things we name and things we eat and things we love. In some ways, I think it’s what’s wrong with society. A wicked stew of anthropomorphism and commercialism. There’s always money to be made and if that means mass production of farm-raised goldfish so be it says the corporate suits. I cringe to think about where all those exotic fish really come from and how they get to PetSmart or any of the other bulk sellers. Shouldn’t our ability to own most animals be limited to our capacity for seeing them in the wild? Even capturing them in the wild? Should it really be necessary for Suzie in Georgia to own a Lithuanian rock lizard? Or better yet, shouldn’t some things be unownable? And shouldn’t some things be place-specific? That’s how you grow to learn about it and that knowledge leads to a sense of ownership and responsibility, acquired only through time and proximity to the environment. Maybe it’s just me but the mass-produced world of Siamese fighting fish and exported boa constrictors seems to be the wrong side of the coin.

Regardless of all of this, my daughter had a good birthday. She loved watching the fish swim under the blue lamp every night before bed. As a father, all personal prejudices fade in comparison to her smile. And as I watched the orange ones pester the black and white ones, I admitted to myself that Todd knew much more about exotic fish affairs than I did. So, it probably won’t be the last time I submit to the B.F.G’s. But I can’t promise I won’t lie when they ask me my tank size. That’s a personal matter and it’s none of their damn business.