Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Something Fishy

Posted September 07, 2007
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

"You made our lives more interesting," Ben says, and his voice wavers. "You were as good as a goldfish could be," I say, and Birdy cries, "Good-bye, Charlie!" before Michael tosses a shovelful of dirt onto our poor, dead fish.

The gravitas is, perhaps, a bit affected. But what can you do? It's sad when a pet dies. This is an incontrovertible fact, and I even say it out loud a number of times. But a fish is tricky. That Charlie made our lives more interesting might be a true statement on, say, Opposite Day. The swimming in circles! The swallowing of food flakes! The accidental blooping against the side of the bowl! We are all feeling a little guilty, I think. Charlie is dead, and we took good care of him. But we didn't love him passionately.

Which is not to say that his death wasn't a blow, because it was. I had gotten home late from an evening baby shower, and Ben ran out to greet me in his pajamas. The look on his face can only be described as stricken. "What is it?" I said. "Honey, what happened?" And Ben said, tremblingly, "Charlie died." Then he burst into silent tears in my arms, the hummingbird of his heart fluttering against my chest. The two goldfish occupy so little of my day-to-day psychic space that my brain stammered for one terrible second. Charlie? I panicked through a mental roster of Ben's schoolmates and relatives before I remembered the fish. Then I carried Ben upstairs, so relieved that my knees wobbled.

Ben's stoic weeping had not prepared me for the scene that was Birdy. She was sobbing on the carpet, naked and slick with snot. "I think she might be a little tired," Michael whispered to me, while Birdy cried, "Waaaaah!" and then "AAAAAAANGH!" Then she rolled onto her back and bawled, "Charliiiiieeeee!!!" Then she interrupted her own wailing to ask crisply about the underpants she was putting on, "Does the tag go in the back or the front?" And then a little more: "Waaaa haaaaa huuuunh." Michael told me later that when they first found Charlie belly-up, Birdy had said, cheerfully, "Well, at least there's always the other one!" before realizing the full profundity of her sorrow.

"You're so sad about Charlie," I said to Birdy. "Since Ben can't hear the chapter we're trying to read him, do you maybe want to be sad in a quieter way? Or go in the other room for a while?" Birdy ran out and we heard her in our bedroom. "Boo hoo hoo!" she cried. And then, experimentingly, "Bew hew hew!" And then, a little later, "Bo ho ho!"

Overall, this was significantly less profound than Birdy's heartache over our dear, departed whoopee cushion. Really, you haven't known grief until you come upon two preschoolers and a burst farting device. The air had been punctuated with such agonized shrieks that we dashed into the living room, expecting to find Birdy and her friend Tessa on the floor with fractured bones poking through their skin, blood spilling from their ear holes. Instead, there was the tattered rubber disk, and the two inconsolable girls, tears pouring down their faces, their open, hysterical mouths bright and threaded with saliva. No amount of wisdom or philosophy -- Whoopee cushions don't last forever! We sure got a lot of fun out of that one! -- could ease their woe. Thank goodness Michael figured out how to patch it with duct tape.

Now we are laying Charlie to rest beneath a potted astilbe that has waited weeks to be transplanted. The children are grave but dry-eyed while we shovel, and I say, "Ashes to ashes," and shoot Michael a look that means, "If you say funk to funky, we know Major Tom's a junky I will kill you." "Dust to dust," I say and offer a kind of secular-composting-cycles-of-life explanation of the saying. Ben's such a stickler for accuracy that I expect him to quibble. I'm waiting for the hair splitting, the argument that Charlie's weird cannibal diet was generated more from the water than the earth. But I forget how grown-up he has become. Ben nods seriously, pats the earth, and gets on with his day.

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Something Fishy

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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