We watch a lot of Polish Elmo over at the Hannan household. One of Ben’s few words is “Emo.” For those of you who don’t know, Elmo has a goldfish named “Dorotka” (in Polish, possibly Dorthy in English? I wouldn’t know). I thought it would be great to get Ben a goldfish, name it Dorotka. I imagined he would stare at the bowl transfixed making fish mouth gestures with his lips, trying to feed it, catch it. I assumed I’d have to put it up out of reach so he wouldn’t start drinking the bowl water. It would come out whenever we watched Elmo on TV or played with the Elmo doll. Kids love fish.
I assumed wrong. Turns out, Ben doesn’t care about fish. He dedicated exactly 3 seconds of his short attention span to Dorotka when I introduced them. While he did show an inclination to throw in a handful of fishy-smelling flakes into the bowl at a few feeding times, the fish was otherwise completely ignored. Left for me to take care of.
And who knew fish pooped so much? I didn’t have pebbles in the bowl so all the poopies were visible. And plentiful. As soon as you change the water (did it twice, thank you very much), they are back. And the food flakes just kind of disintegrate and make a cloudy muk. Dorotka’s water was rarely crystal clear, I’ll be honest.
And boy was Dorotka slimy. I wouldn’t really know because I would obviously never touch Dorotka or put myself in any kind of situation that would allow Dorotka to skim past any part of my body. In general, I’ve gotten pretty hands off when it comes to pets . I NEVER touch my parents’ stinky cat Kicia (see post “I can’t believe Kicia #3 is still alive”); I have even cut down petting my own dog Rio to a minimum as she is a bit stinky. So obviously, the sliminess of Dorotka was assumed, not verified. I did my best to prevent any interaction. Really, the only danger time was when changing the water so I strategized a way to do it without taking the fish out of the bowl. I call it “dilution.” I dumped out as much water out as possible without Dorotka taking the plunge into the sink, and then filled the bowl back up with clean water. Then again, water would be dumped and refilled. And so on until the water was crystal clear. I think Dorotka liked it– she got pretty active with all the turbulence, kind of like swimming up a river. Never had to take the fish out or put it back in the bowl, threatening a possible collision between fish and hand. Then I was supposed to do add a couple of drops of something that neutralized the chlorine in the water. But that bottle was somewhere in the kitchen so I never did that.
So that’s probably why Dorotka died. Too much chlorine, or maybe the diluting cleaning method wasn’t as awesome as I thought. Maybe too much food. Or too little, as Dorotka went on a diet when we went to Panama for a week; this may have weakened her system. After the last cleaning, Dorotka started swimming real low. So low I got suspicious. I figured that maybe it was because the water was still a little chilly from the fresh tap, some kind of instinct to stay deep in the pond at winter.
But apparently, these were Dorotka’s last moments with us. A couple hours later, Dorotka was swimming very much at the surface of the water, belly up. When fish die, their “swim bladder,” a cavity that is filled with oxygen and helps fish with buoyancy when living, fills up with with too many gases and the fish goes straight up. The belly also fills with gases, some of them from decomposition, so belly up. It was gross. I waited for Tim to get home to flush Dorotka to Nemo land and throw out, not recycle, the bowl.
I sometimes feel a little guilty about the chlorine drops but mostly I’m just happy I didn’t get the $45 dollar fancy goldfish with the big cheeks and flowy tail. Dorotka was a 19 cent fish sold as food for bigger fish. So really, we gave her a few extra weeks of life before she met what was her destiny. Much easier than returning the fish, bowl and all, to the store, with a lot less spillage along the way (my plan before the timely expiration). And Ben never even noticed.
