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Sparkle (1)
Karma’s a bitch. Here I was lacking a plan, so I took the easy path. And where did it lead me? Hell. Specifically, pet hell.
I’ll explain. Kate recently turned six. And Mark was away for work the 10 days before her birthday. So I planned the party, and shopped for the pinata, and food, and decorations. I came up with activities for the kids, hired a magician, attempted to gussy up our yard. I scoured social media outlets, cookbooks, and the Inter-Web for the most succulent, moist chocolate cake recipe in all the land.
Then one night, toiling over a hot laptop and reviewing my gift purchases on Amazon, I lamented that I hadn’t ordered a special present for Kate. So I emailed Mark.
“What do you say we buy her a fish?” I suggested. “I mean, just write a promissory note, then we can all go together and she can pick it out.”
From Down Under, hours later, Mark received the email and shot back, “Great idea.”
I brushed my hands together with the smug satisfaction of a mother who had in fact done it all. Easiest. Present. Ever.
That must’ve been when the gods looked down at me and shared belly laugh. “Foolish mother!” they chortled. “She thinks it’ll be easy, does she?”
Then, to put my all my perfect party planning to shame -- to show how powerless I truly was -- they cursed me with overcast weather on the day of the party. It’d been in the low 80s and gloriously sunny for over a week, but the day of the party -- the outdoor party in our backyard -- was bleak and chilly. The Bay Area’s legendary Indian Summer let me down.
Had I only known that the gathering of gray clouds that day was a foreshadowing. Oh, the party went off without a hitch, weather aside. But the next day we piled into the car, the girls chanting “Fish! Fish! Fish!” and Mark and I smiling at each other from the front seats, smug with the sweet knowledge that we were doing something wonderful to enrich our darling nuclear family.
Hey, we were hardly buying the kids a Labrador Retriever. But, you know, baby steps.
Mark had sussed out fish stores online and took us to a place two towns over that was supposed to be “the best.” The squat, windowless building was covered with a mural of tropical fish, and I delightedly sing-songed to the girls as we pulled up, “Guess which place we’re going to?”
It was all so thrilling and wonderful. I took a history-capturing photo of Kate, arms and legs stretched wide, in front of the mural before we entered the building. Mark gallantly held the door open for me and I smiled as I slipped in. A happy young family on our way to add a fishy friend to our ranks.
Inside, the walls gleamed with rows of brightly lit tanks. Within them stirred all manner of colorful, flowy-finned fishies with green sea grasses swaying. The girls ran from one tank to the next. “Nemo!” Paige squealed. “Whoa, look at these guys!” Kate yelped peering into a tank of small silvery fish glowing with purple iridescence. “I want them!”
While the kids and I explored deeper into the store’s back rooms, Mark got the attention of a young Asian employee -- a collegiate tattooed fish geek -- who we eventually met up with at the front of the shop. I pulled out a scrap of paper from my purse and recited to her the amount of space we had for a tank. (I had every detail figured out.)
Okay, so tanks. Fish Geek Girl started reeling off statistics about cubic something-or-others of water, and pointed to a wall full of spankin’ new, unoccupied fish homes. “This one’s a little smaller. It needs a light, but it’s got the filter built in. Now for a little more you can get this larger tank, with the light and the filter, but the lid is sold separately. This one is a kit and where you think it would be the best deal, you’re actually better off buying a light from these people, and a filter which will last you three to four years, then get the tank over here from this other vendor but they are totally compatible -- as long as you make sure you’re getting everything in the M Series.”
The wall of tanks started to swirl together before me.
