My mother was an elementary school secretary.  I was teaching my first year of kindergarten.  She gave me a fish in a gold fish bowl.  The fish looked like a blue gill…a pan fish.  But, this fish’s name was Oscar.  I thought that was a cute name, not realizing it is the type of fish he was. I tapped on his glass to say “Hello Oscar!”  He rushed toward me.  He turned red, and looked pissed. “I think he’s hungry.” I said.

He came with fish food flakes.  I sprinkled some on top of the water in his bowl and he hit the surface like a shark.  He almost nipped my fingers.  I took the fish, the flakes, and the gold fish bowl to my apartment.  I carefully set the bowl down on a counter in my room.  He was obviously angry.

I fed him before I left for work. He thrashed around in the bowl, which obviously was too small.  When I came back from work he was not in his bowl.  He was on the carpet, a bit dry.  I screamed and picked him up and threw him back in his water.  It took him awhile, but he came around and I changed his water, with him out of the bowl in a teapot.  I fed him again, and he charged me again.  I did not have time or money to get him an actual aquarium.  But, I did know another kindergarten teacher who was my friend.  She had a nice big tank with guppies, and a little castle and plantings in a gravel bottom.  It had a filter, too!

I brought Oscar to school, and my friend let me add him to her fish aquarium.  She left him, and I left him, at the end of a long day.  We fed the fish, all of them.

I was in the teacher’s lounge the next morning, taking a sip of coffee. She called me by my last name when she entered the lounge.  Many teachers’ eyes looked at her, and then at me.  She took me by the hand. We walked into her well supplied kindergarten.

“Look!”  she said, pointing to the aquarium.  I looked.  All of the guppies were gone!  “He ate them!”  she said.  We both looked at the one fish in the aquarium.  Sadly, I brought him home in a gold fish bowl, with fish flake food.  I could not feed him guppies in an aquarium in a classroom with 32 kids watching.

My mom and dad had a cabin between a great lake and an inland lake. I I took him up north to their cabin and on a Saturday morning I waded into the tame inland lake full of bait fish.  I poured him into the lake.  I saw him chase little silver minnows immediately, and then he disappeared in the lake.

I missed him a little bit.  I had to buy guppies to replace his meal in my friend’s aquarium.  I gave her the fish flake food.  It took me a year to live it down in that school.