The other day, I was reading on the porch in the sun and looking out into the garden, and I thought to myself that what I really need is a giant tub of fish, dug into the ground so that the rim is almost at dirt level. We used to keep fish in the water troughs in Elk, and I could never figure out how the animals didn’t eat them by accident while drinking, but they didn’t, because the fish got huge.

And then I started thinking that if I seriously wanted a little pool of fish, I would need to think about how to protect them from the neighborhood cats and birds, which would pretty much regard that sort of thing as an open-season all-hours buffet. And then, for some reason, I remembered the Day the Fish Died.

When we lived in Caspar, my father and I, for a time, kept fish. Mostly goldfish, as I recall, in a big aquarium which was later the scene of the Great Frog Debacle (a story for another day…if you ask nicely). We also kept parakeets and finches, which were much more of a pain in the ass than the fish, and I think my father was a big fan of the fish. I was too. Fish are pretty cool, you know, even if you can’t really interact with them most of the time. (Except for tame koi. Tame koi are cool.)

At any rate, one time I went away somewhere for a few days in the summer, and my father decided, while I was gone, that the fishtank needed to be cleaned. This was probably true, because we tended to let it go awhile between cleanings, due to the water shortage issue. (And apparently goldfish actually like dirty water better, so we were doing them a favor.)

My father duly cleaned the fishtank, using a few drops of bleach as he scrubbed, like he usually did, and rinsing it before filling it and putting the fish back in. When I came home the next day, he mentioned that he had cleaned the tank, and we both trouped into the side room to look at the results, and…

…well, you may be able to guess what had happened. Concerned about water use, my father did not rinse the fishtank out as well as he usually did, and as a result, there was some bleach residue in the tank. So the goldfish were very very dead, except for one which was still swimming around drunkenly with bits of its scales peeling off.

We both felt very bad, and those were the last fish we kept. We ended up giving them a Viking funeral at the beach, I think to atone for my father’s sin, and I suspect that he remembers the Day the Fish Died as vividly as I do.