1 fish, 2 fish, old fish, new fish

About 15 years ago, they tore down the old elementary schoolin our town and offered to give away the bricks. My wife, who went to that school and had an emotional attachment, agreed to take a load of bricks. When I came home and found a 4-foot pile in our driveway and asked my wife what the heck (I didn’t say heck) I was going to do with that many bricks, she shruggedand walked away.

So we built stuff — walls around gardens and trees, pillars for a new deck and finally, a fish pond.

When I say fish pond, most people think of a pool with rocks, ferns and maybe a water feature. Mine is more like a large bathtub but deeper — and made out of bricks. Like one of those above-ground crypts you see in old cemeteriesbut with no lid.

With all the free bricks, it cost me only a few bags of mortar and a cheap pond liner. I half expected that when I filled it, the water pressure would blow out the walls and I’d have to start from scratch. But the brick bathtub that wasn’t meant to last has lasted all this time.

Each summer, we trudge down to the fish store, grab a dozen “feeder” goldfish and dump them in the crypt. Their only purpose is to make sure the pond doesn’t become a mosquito factory.

Each year, within the first dayor so, we find two or three floaters, weaklings who couldn’t make the transition to the outdoors. At some point that summer, we’ll find wet raccoon footprints on the ledge, a fish head or two on our lawn chairs and know we havea few less fish.

Every once in a while, my son’s cat visits. He doesn’t seem to like us all that much, but he loves sushi. Usually, by fall, there are two or three stragglers. Then comes winter, the brick bathtub freezes solid, and in the spring we start fresh with a batch of new recruits.

To be fair, I never intended to have goldfish as pets. Feeder goldfish, by their name, are destined to be expendable. It’s a good thing goldfish can’t read. If they saw “FEEDER” written on their tank, they’d be horribly depressed. Were they actors on “Star Trek,” they’d be handed a scene with no dialogue, a non-working phaser anda red tunic.

I did try the first year to overwinter a few in a fish tank in our pantry. The stench was unimaginable, and when they died, you could smell it when you rang our doorbell.

The past couple of winters have been warmer than usual, and I guess the pond hasn’t frozen solid, so there’s one survivor. He’s now about 3 inches long. This weekend, my daughters became concerned that old fish might be lonely, so we trudged down to the fish store to get some friends.

To my great aggravation, the fish guy said we could no longer get feeder goldfish, as old fish would see them as snack food. Instead, we had to buy larger fish, at $8.99 a pop. With fish food and a water plant, the bill added up to almost $30.

We got home and added two new fish to the pond. All was well … for about 30 seconds. Then old fish, suddenly aware that he no longer had the place to himself, started chasing the new fish around, biting at their fins. I tried to netold fish to stop him, but he keptat it — incessantly.

As I write this, I am sitting on my deck, watching old fish chase the new fish, and weighing options. Old fish has been around for a while, but my net investment in him was 10 cents. The newcomers are worth $8.99 apiece but would be pretty useless without fins.

The only winner in this situation seems to be my son’s cat, who one way or another ishaving sushi for dinner.