View from the North 40: When a fish tale is more than a little fishy

Sometimes I feel crazy about my animals, really. Tuesday I spent 45 minutes riding my horse with my dog along for the adventure, then spent one-and-a-half hours cleaning mud and weed seeds off my dog.

Why? Because, that was the responsible thing to do, and I think my dog looks cuter than a bug's ear with the fuzzy/wiry hair on his legs left longish. Chaps - that's what they call the fuzzy-leg look, and he rocks them like an A-list star - collect everything dirt and weed related, and they need to be cleaned frequently.

His chaps did get trimmed a bit in the process, but only a bit. Hey, I didn't want to get crazy with being practical. Like the mirror opposite of that impractical Australian goldfish owner:

A couple in Melbourne, Australia, had a goldfish named George. George was 10 years old. One day, NBCNews.com reported Oct. 15, little George started developing a tumor on his head. Distraught over the family fish's possibly eminent demise, the couple sought out a specialist ... a fish surgeon. They found one.

There is such a thing.

George was anesthetized, he had a "breathing" tube inserted in his mouth - it fed oxygen-rich and anesthesia-laced water through his gills, and the surgeon removed the tumor, sewed George back up and released him back into the confines of his tank so he could continue to lead a full life of meandering back and forth in a small tank of oxygenated water.

The bill came to almost $300, the article said ... to perform surgery on a common goldfish.

This would not happen in my household with a creature that couldn't be cuddled or patted on the head.

When I was a little, little, little kid, my parents got a goldfish for my older brother and me. I have no memory of abandoning the fish but, apparently, we did this because we were moving. I do remember visiting my grandparents' house and seeing the goldfish swimming in a bowl and learning that he had been ours. The goldfish had one eye set higher than the other. We called him Bug-eyes.

Over the years, each time we visited Grandma and Grandpa, ol' Bug-eyes had graduated to a bigger tank as he grew and grew. He occasionally had another fishy friend to keep him company, but those friends always seemed to make their way to the great ocean beyond the rainbow bridge, but Bug-eyes remained a constant - until one day, of course. Goldfish are not immortal or particularly long-lived, after all.

My grandparents' house was devoid of any fish tanks, and Bug-eyes was gone. Grandpa said they buried him in the backyard. Grandma said they gave him a water burial fitting for a fish.

They were both essentially telling the truth since they had a septic tank in the backyard.

That said, I wouldn't have been surprised to find they both lied and that Grandma had filleted ol' Bug-eyes and served him to Grandpa for supper. She had taken to heart the lessons she learned as a child in the Depression. The truth is scattered with them, in the wind at George Town Lake. They would tolerate neither the expense of a coffin nor the extravagance of taking up space in a plot for themselves.

That's how we roll.

So I have been trying to imagine my grandparents, or anyone else in my family, doing something like taking Bug-eyes to a fish doctor for a tumor, or to an ophthalmologist for corrective surgery on his unfortunately off-set eyes, and, nope, it's not coming to me. This is the logic from my pragmatic ancestors that guides me daily.

On the other hand. If the Buddhists are right and I'm destined for resurrection - surely, as a "lower" life form because I'm obviously not transcending my human condition in this life - I hope I come back as this couple's goldfish. Maybe I'll learn the subtle art of compassion and sacrifice from their example and recycle on through further up the food chain as a monkey, or even a magpie, in my next lifetime.

(The eternal sunshine of the wishful thinking mind brightens my day at [email protected].)