Aquarium Drama

Now that our platies have declared a truce among themselves for well over a year and have stopped alternately impregating each other and biting pieces out of each other’s fins, by far our most difficult tank-bound characters are a plecostomus (Mr. Plec), a largish white angel fish (Angel Fish), and a newly blue crayfish (Crawfish). Mr. Plec and Angel Fish were both inherited from my younger brother. Mr. Plec came as the first colonist, leaving the brother's tanks to start ours; Angel Fish was taken in as a refugee when brother and his wife left the country for a few months.

Crawfish was our own idea--we wanted to have a second tank and had both grown up playing with crayfish in various streams and swamps around our homes. We thought we’d have a tank with one crayfish and 5 - 7 small schooling fish. A few casualties later, Crawfish is now the sole inhabitant of a large tank which he regularly tries to escape.

We had first brought over Mr. Plec to start the crayfish/fish combination tank (he’s proven quite good at this), thinking that the morose and anti-social plecostomus would enjoy a less crowded home. It turns out that Mr. Plec and Crawfish liked the same spot under the same rock, which led to fights. Mr. Plec could bat Crawfish back several inches with a spasmodic whip of his body, but Crawfish had claws, and even though he seemed to be taking a regular beating, Mr. Plec quickly got some snips in his fins that worried us.

We transferred Mr. Plec back to the other tank. Eager to demonstrate his gratitude, Mr. Plec instantly changed from a grumpy curmudgeon--hiding in his rock cave and refusing to come out except in the middle of the night to snatch some food--to a pillar of the community, regularly visible and ostentatiously doing his part to clean the algae off the side of the tank. His obvious delight, as well as his sudden assumption of his rightful responsibilities, convinced us that he at least should stay in the original tank.

A couple of weeks later, we transferred our four red-eyed tetras over to the crayfish tank. These silvery little fish generally stay near the top of the tank, so we assumed they’d be safe from Crawfish who--despite his best efforts to get out by inching himself up between the glass and the filter or by climbing the aquarium plant to the top only to have it double over under his weight and slowly deposit him on the ground--remains disconsolately earthbound. Unfortunately, the tetras proved to be more curious about than frightened by their new tankmate, and developed an unhealthy habit of hanging out just in claw reach. A few mornings later, I came down to see an incredibly self-satisfied Crawfish polishing off the last morsels of a tetra. We moved the remaining three tetras back to the other tank.

But now we have a dilemma. Mr. Plec and Angel Fish have been fighting. Earlier in the week, Mr. Plec was chasing Angel Fish. This is fairly common, and we normally restore order by rapping on the tank a few times in the direction of Mr. Plec, who hates any disturbance. However, this morning, Angel Fish was the instigator, and their interchange became wild enough that Angel Fish and Mr. Plec both ricocheted a couple of times off the walls of the tank, making enough noise that Riggs went over to investigate, hoping for (at the least) a mouse to kill. My husband rapped on the tank and spoke sternly to both, while Riggs watched smugly--very aware that it was not he who was being disciplined this time.

The talking-to seems to have held for today, but it’s an open question now of whether one or the other needs to come over to Crawfish’s tank for punishment, to make them grateful by comparison for their lot in life, even if it involves each other.

Preachers

Sunday morning in rural southwestern West Virginia has pretty limited radio options: preachers. Based on the churches we drove past on tiny roads encroached by snow, either “free will” or “old regular” Baptists, or miscellaneous baseline protestant, with a possible predilection for snake handling.

A couple of them were pleasant: quiet, slow-speaking voices constructing a reasonable argument within a rigidly secluded universe of pre-assumptions. One of these concluded his careful monotone by singing all the verses of In the Sweet Bye and Bye acapella; at best, he was atonal. Another preacher—exhorting with the rapid fire delivery of a machine gun—spasmodically inserted “praise God” or “Hallelujah” between every second or third word. We could only bear his noise long enough for him to tell us he was going to read a couple verses of 1rst Corinthians; this took a couple minutes. Another preacher wound his congregants up with sing-song, four-beat phrases, the fourth beat always being a sharp intake of breath: 1, 2, 3, hiccup!; 1, 2, 3, hiccup!

The most remarkable thing about the preachers was how identical their messages were: God’s grace offers salvation; the Bible is the infallible and unquestioned word of God; if you elect to be saved, you will go to heaven. A Presbyterian by birth, I am allergic to the last message.

I was more allergic to the boredom of the dichotomy of heaven and hell: heaven is happiness and blue skies; hell is unhappiness and fire. One billboard we drove past depicted a blue smiley face in the clouds if you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, and a red frowny face in flames if you don’t.

Why would we ever decide that heaven is a blue smiley face in the clouds? What if you don’t want to be happy all of the time? What if you prefer the variability of being human and alive? I like blue skies, but I also like fog, blueblack twilight, grey winter sun, and rain—as long as I don’t have to bike too far in it. And what sort of misguided human imagination would want to compress an omnipotent, all encompassing God into a being set on securing something as limpid as human happiness?

Whatever a person believes—or doesn’t—if you believe in a god, you have to believe the he—or she—is an inscrutable, uncontrollable riot. And that "heaven" must be a much more multifaceted experience than a blue smiley face.

Handles

We recently shattered a glass pitcher. Though already warmed, the pitcher apparently was cooler enough than the hot water poured into it. Unfortunately I missed the event, but I gather it was spectacular: our dog was still leery of the sink twelve hours later.

Some of the resultant pieces were beautiful—much more interesting to look at and think about than the original pitcher. The piece that held the handle—with the handle—remained intact; it was independently elegant. Looking at it, I had some understanding of why people seem to pay so much attention to handles.

When we were trying to figure out how to buy kitchen cabinets to replace the ones we inherited in our house (which had rotten to the point that they could be torn in pieces effortlessly by hand), I was stymied by the variety of handles available. I frequently become nervous trying to differentiate between all the possible toothpastes and select one, but the varieties of toothpaste are nothing to handles.

Places that sell home furnishings frequently have several displays of multiple handles each. You can choose between 10 types of kitchen cabinets, but you can elect to open those cabinets with roughly 35 different handles. There are three types of doors, but you can open that door with hundreds of different knobs.

An organization in the Maryland suburbs that collects and resells recycled building materials has several sections overflowing with items that walk a very fine tightrope between junk and trash, including large collections of handles removed from discarded drawers, doors, and cabinets. Also church pews—sold by the foot—and elderly toilets missing important elements (tank and seat). We picked through the handles at one point, to find doorknobs to replace the ones that a combination of homeless people and hooligans had ripped out of our bedroom door (prior to our moving in, of course), but couldn’t find two knobs that would fit together to make the whole apparatus. So, we went to Home Depot and paid $8 for the cheapest complete, but unrecycled, version.

Shattering the pitcher has another unexpected benefit: we don’t have it anymore. I didn’t object to the pitcher—we used it, but infrequently. However, it is irritating to have something that you can use, but don’t really need, but have to hold onto because someone gave it to you and it would be more wasteful to get rid of it. I tried to invent a use for it as a holder for miscellaneous kitchen utensils: a grater, measuring cups, a set of incremental teaspoons and tablespoons.

But those things didn’t really need to be held; it was a superfluous use.

The Rainbow

Even though I’m an English major, I just finished reading my first DH Lawrence novel. He was one of those writers that I always felt I should read, just like I’d always felt obliged to like Shakespeare. Moving into our foreclosed reclamation project/house in an area just east of the most eastward “improving” neighborhood, my husband and I were able to unbox and shelve the books that had been languishing in our parents’ homes for the years of dorm rooms and tiny apartments in South Hadley, Richmond, Dublin, NYC, and DC. So this past year I’ve been rediscovering the books I liked, or didn’t, or ignored, for the first two decades of my life.

I’ve realized that Shakespeare actually is the genius that other English majors idolize him for being. His unstruggled grasp of meter and precision on humanness are humbling; most poets resort to triteness, clumsy metric workarounds, and adjectives. And, I’ve realized Milton is just damn lazy. He has some great lines, but he has more where the meter collapses; the words weren’t rethought from the first draft; and he substitutes making his point with banging his readers over the head with it, simply because he’s too careless--or conceited--to put in the work.

I’ve also discovered that DH Lawrence isn’t actually a novelist--despite writing the 400+ pages in The Rainbow--but I’m sorry I’ve missed him for 30 years. He’s an imagist, mostly unconcerned with plot. With words just barely shy of too corpulent, he captures the confused mutability of “love” shared between any two persons. A stolid marriage is shown in its daily instability of mistimings, desires, urgencies, silences, cruelties, affections, and submissions. It is a little tedious to follow several generations of lovers/spouses working out how to negotiate themselves against each other, but I’m impressed that someone wrote it believably.

Even if a bit indulgently.