We then tucked that little mermaid upright into this Fruity Pebbles beach, but she kept listing to the side, as though woozy from one too many mai tais at some figurine mixer.Ī morning ritual began. The family went to the pet store, spent more on the glass bowl than on its tenant, and covered the base of its new home with small phosphorescent rocks that looked like children’s breakfast cereal. If we had said she would have to carry the fish to the ocean every week so that it could confer with Poseidon, she would have said, “Yes, yes, yes, please I want a fish please, yes.” Which is what we finally said, after being shamed by Nora’s sweet offer to use half her life savings, about $6, to buy a fish for her little sister. īut Grace was 2 at the time, and besotted. My wife, Mary, and I tried to impress upon her the many responsibilities of fish ownership: feeding the fish, cleaning the fish’s bowl feeding the fish, cleaning the fish’s bowl feeding the fish, cleaning the fish’s bowl. After studying it with more intensity than she ever granted that doughy purple dinosaur on television, Grace finally announced that she could not go on living the beginning of her days without a fish of her own. When my older daughter, Nora, got a tropical fish several years ago, my younger daughter, Grace, became mesmerized by the swimming, the swirling, the very being of such a wondrous thing.
It is known formally as John Cronin the Fish, and it goes way back in my young family. Only they were associated with cans of Ensure, chocolate, strawberry and vanilla, bought by the case years ago in the deluded belief that they could magically protect a loved one against cancer. Then come flashbacks of having said these very words before, with similar emphasis. “Come on! Eat something! Please!” I say, until I remember that I am pleading with a fish. He doesn’t move, but there is little I can do. Sometimes they settle onto his tail and even, now and then, on his forehead. Sometimes they float just beyond his mouth, and he bites and misses. Just know that I have become caregiver to a $3 fish that could fit in my mouth, a particular problem should CPR become necessary.Įvery day now, I shake out seven or eight pellets and carefully fling them into the bowl, one by one, aiming the brown specks so they descend where the fish can eat them with minimal movement. I’ve seen that before, in other eyes, and never mind. But in its BB-size eyes I see, or I think I see, the panic before acceptance. Never once have I taken it for a walk or even a swim.Ī satisfactory answer evades me. Then why have I become emotionally attached to a pocket-size creature that lives in a cocoon of water? It does not sleep in my lap. I’m just not up to it.įor the record, I am a fish person only in the sense that I like to eat them, exposing me, I suppose, to some critical filleting.
Fish in fish bowl full#
View the full definition in the Macmillan Dictionary.We humans usually consider fish like this to be eminently flushable. (Vince Poscente, Canadian Olympian and motivational speaker) When this same fish is placed in a large tank, it will grow to about nine inches long.” “Interestingly, koi, when put in a fishbowl, will only grow up to three inches. The most popular pet for a fishbowl, though, is the goldfish. Betta fish, guppies, White Cloud minnows, blind cave tetras, zebra danios and salt and pepper corydoras are all suited to thriving in a fishbowl. The best fish to put in a fishbowl are small and prefer cold water. Because of this, only certain types of domestic fish are well-suited to living in a fishbowl. A fishbowl doesn’t have a filtration system or temperature controls, it must be cleaned frequently and have the water changed often in order to keep the fish healthy. Since most fishbowls are round, with no corners or spaces for a fish to hide in, the word fishbowl has also come to mean a situation in which a person does not have any privacy.Ī fishbowl is a very basic and simple home for a pet fish.
Fish in fish bowl free#
A fishbowl is filled with water and decorative stones and maybe a few plastic plants, then the fish is placed inside where it is free to swim around.
Fishbowl is a word that refers to a large round container used to keep fish as pets.