The Sag Harbor Fire Department carnival is on this week, which coincided with my taking the unnamed goldfish my son, Ellis, won there years ago up to the office for a several-week visit. The thing has thrived since Ellis brought it home six years ago — or more.
The fish is indifferent whether its tank water is clear or impenetrable green, so long as it gets a pinch of food every day. Over time, it has grown from an undistinguished inch and a quarter into a gossamer-tailed beauty about six inches in length. Not that goldfish thrive on neglect; indeed, it is my opinion that so long as they are fed, their tank is relatively clean, and they are around some kind of action for entertainment, they become part of the family.
Some friends in Sag Harbor kept their goldfish in a traditional round fishbowl next to the stove. There it could keep an eye on things, and at gatherings kept tabs on who might have too much wine. It, too, lived to a ripe old age.
Not all is peaches and cream for carnival goldfish. On the way home in a car seat one year, one of the girls squeezed and poked at the plastic bag containing her prize fish. It burst, of course, and spilled over her lap. We never did find that goldfish, and for months afterward, years, maybe, she would cry, “What happened to Goldie?” whenever she thought of it, which was often.
Nor is the whole ordeal a pleasure for parents. Ellis did not care for the rides particularly. Instead, he would badger for just one more $5 game in the rigged midway. It wasn’t the stuffed animals that he was after; I think the games themselves were the fun for him. And the goldfish, which he managed to get home to Amagansett without breaking its bag. Now, as old as Methuselah, relatively speaking, it appears to be settling into office life, at least for now, from its new perch on the way from the newsroom to the kitchen.
In goldfish-adjacent news, The Star front office’s stalwart Russell Bennett observed a 19-inch-long orange, white, and black-colored koi in Town Pond this week. There is only one way that it got there, and it wasn’t that the stork dropped it. There are no storks around here, anyway.