Gold fish are popular pets for children. Compared to many other pets they are low maintenance, do not pose a threat of destroying parts of the house or property, do not entice children with the desire to take them on walks outside the confinements of the house, cost little to keep alive and healthy and rarely break limbs or prone to injuries that will require an expensive visit to the vet and result in a traumatic episode involving both the animal and the child. These limitations mean that children do not usually become as emotionally attached to them because of the minimal opportunities to physically play and generally care for them. The death of a gold fish does not generally have the same emotional quake as the death of say, a dog or cat.
However, the longer the gold fish live, the longer children keep them in their living rooms, the more time they spend feeding them, poking their fingers into the water to attract a rapid smooch or stir some attention, routinely washing out the tank, the greater the bond develops.
My sisters and I had two gold fish when we were children called Gertrude and Bartholomew. Compared to gold fish that our friends owned, they lived a decently healthy long life. Gertrude and Bartholomew saw us grow from children into the middle stages of puberty; to be more precise they lived for about 10 years, in the same humble and modest fish tank.
We kept a miniature aluminium barrel of fish food which we would modestly scatter over their domestic skies each day after one of us having screamed out if anybody had fed them yet. There were however feeding moments when we wanted to break the monotony of sprinkling packaged fish food. We wanted to treat them to something big, something they would have seen us devour with much eagerness, instead of having to suck down the smelly fish flakes that looked like dead skin, and so occasionally, and unbeknown to our parents, we would treat them to pieces of sliced white bread.
We knew that fish mouths are much smaller than human mouths – our parents reminded us frequently. However, we also knew that treats were given on exceptional occasions and we wanted to prove to our aquatic pets that we loved them. One Saturday morning, my sisters and I decided to treat Gertrude and Bartholomew to a bread crumb banquet and served out one slice of the softest white bread available in the house. We broke it up, sprinkled it across the water surface, watched them chow down a crumb or two and then went off to romp the Saturday away.
Approximately thirty minutes later my sister, Sonya, noticed Gertrude lifelessly floating on top of the water. Sonya shouted out the emergency, ‘Gertrude, the fish, it looks so dead!’ The entire household ran over to discover the seriousness of her SOS call. The gold fish was at this time 6 years old and had never required an emergency call. We took the fish tank to the kitchen sink. It’s all a blur and I cannot recall if taking the fish tank to the kitchen sink was to begin an early funeral due to the sudden disappearance of hope, however I remember my dad taking Gertrude out of the tank and lying her lifeless fish body on the side of the sink. He then opened a drawer and pulled out a butter knife. He had done some pretty bewildering things in the past but surely he was not going to spread Gertrude across a slice of bread, the same loaf of bread that we had killed her with! Dad saw the horror in our faces and assured, “there is still hope.”
He drew Gertrude, all dull, the shiny redness of her scales now looking like discarded copper, to his mouth, mouth to mouth, and shot three swift breaths into Gertrude. He then lowered her and opened his palm and picked up the butter knife. Three gentle but snappy taps with the knife handle on Gertrude’s belly and chest, it was hard to see where the chest finished and belly began, and then back up for another bout of CPR. Three more bullet breaths into Gertrude and back down for another volley of butter knife fish belly drumming. Up again for another series of man-mouth to gold fish-mouth respiration. Then we saw a miracle right there in our kitchen; a flick of Gertrude’s tale. “Did you do move Gertrude’s tail, dad?” asked my sister Sonya. Dad smiled and Gertrude slowly stretched open her mouth. Life had returned to her and her tail flicked lightly.
Dad put her into the fish tank and calmly let her go. Gertrude moved, sunk a little, drunkenly and slowly spiralled down, we began to quickly lose hope again. Dad put his hand into the water and gave Gertrude a little pat on the butt and Gertrude, almost offended, turned her nose up at him and with a small degree of sombre poise she shook her tail and waddled upwards. We turned to dad and to each other with incredulous looks of happy disbelieving belief. Gertrude went on to live another three years though her legend within the Tascone family will live on for as long as we, perhaps even longer.
We had a family dinner just last night at my uncle and aunt’s and got onto the topic of tragic animal and pet deaths and my mother brought up this exact story. I exclaimed how it was a coincidence for I had just begun writing a blog about it! But it was living proof that the legend of Gertrude, the butter knife kitchen CPR gold fish is still strong.