I adopted a little fish today. I call him Merton. Dude is super chatty, and will be filling in for me when I'm out and about. You can keep up with his jetsetting lifestyle attwitter.com/ericasfish
Back in college I had a beautiful blue betta fish who was the love of my life for the first six months of my freshman year. I first glimpsed the little thing as I was walking out of my student job at Schneider Center, where he was swimming in a table filled with rows of gleaming fish bowls. For ten dollars, the man behind the stand assured me, I could get a glass bowl, pink rocks, and the feisty blue fish that caught my eye.
I forked over the cash and hauled the fish up to my castle of a dormitory, nearly slipping on ice and snow and the aggressive squirrels and chipmunks that routinely skittered across the walking paths of my school. After what seemed like miles of walking, I finally barged into my room, faced my roommate, and said, "His name is Adonis. What do you think?"
For half a year, Adonis entertained and kept me company from the shelf above my desk, swaying and dancing to my favorite tunes and wiggling his fins at me during my frequent giggle fits with my roommate and neighbors. When he died, my roommate and I gave him a proper Viking funeral, laying him in a paper boat and setting it on fire on Lake Waban in the middle of the night.
When my first boyfriend and I broke up, I ruefully wrote that we at least lasted "twice as long as the period of time my fish, Adonis, lived."
Merton's got "legend" written all over his little fishy face. I can't wait to see what he gets up to.
