I’m in a hurry today, as I barely have time to wash all the camping laundry before our next trip.  I have a treasure trove of stories to share, but I want to give them all some time and effort, and since I am committed to one post per day this month, I turned toward the NaBloPoMo daily writing prompt.  Today’s question is:  What kind of fish are you most like?

And to that I say, I have no idea and I don’t know anything about fish.  But it does remind me of goldfish and summer.   Jack scored a pair of Sports Illustrated Binoculars from Gramma’s house, which the two of us have agreed to call binocks.  And when I tried to insist that we couldn’t possibly take them, what would they do without? etc, Gramma said she had a pair of much better binoculars.   And I had a flashback to the air show, when I was about 5 years old.  We were sitting on a pier in downtown Cleveland and I asked to use the binoculars.  My dad put them around my neck and said, “Don’t drop them in the water or you’ll have to go in after them.”  I looked down and there was an enormous goldfish, dead, floating on it’s side below us.  I knew there was no way I was going to drop the binoculars, but the thought of that fish made me lose all interest in whatever I might have seen through those binoculars.  But hey, that kind of dedication to your binoculars is what keeps them around 33 years later, so you can gladly give a random pair away to your grandson.  We had lots to look at through those SI be-knock-lee-ars this weekend, they came in handy spotting Dave on the course.

But binoculars and dead goldfish are forever linked in my mind.

And I can’t talk about dead goldfish without remembering the time I was washing the breakfast dishes, in my pjs, and bare feet one morning, shortly after the Fourth of July.  You knew it had to be shortly after the Fourth, because this is about goldfish, and we always won goldfish at Bay Days.  (Here is where I would link to the awesome site about Bay Days if there was such a thing.  But Bay Days is the best, trust.)  So, I was in the kitchen, and I stepped on what I thought was a grape, and shook it off.  Literally, I shook my foot until the “grape” detached itself.  I’m not one to investigate a crushed grape on the floor if I can help it.  My chore that day was to do the breakfast dishes and I wanted to be done as fast as possible.   But the second time I stepped on the grape I decided to handle it.  I lifted up my foot and looked at my sole.  And stuck there, was a goldfish.  My sister’s goldfish.   She wasn’t too happy that I had stepped on her goldfish, and I was pretty wrecked.  I was sent to the shower to cry inconsolably while I washed fish guts off my foot.  Meanwhile, my mom consoled my sister.

There is just something about dead goldfish that remind me of summer.