Why in the world would these fish make me sad? Well, it's a long story.Back a couple years ago, I bought these fishbowls as a present for my fiancee. She loved them. It took a while - I don't remember quite how long - before they were finally hung up in the apartment back in Syracuse. Weeks; maybe months. But, I finally hung them, and we got fish.
Now, we don't know anything about fish, including good places to buy them, so we bought a lot of fish - little 13 cent feeder fish, but they kept dying. It wasn't the cost so much as the feeling that we were needlessly killing off a lot of innocent animals. But when they were alive, they were fun to watch. The last batch (in Syracuse) was purchased in the summer of 2011, right around the time my fiancee was applying for the job here. Those fish lasted a while; one lived until this past September, over a year. But not in these fishbowls: he migrated to a standard fishbowl, and lived where I was living (and after Syracuse I moved several times before settling into my current apartment - there's more to that story, too, but maybe for another time).
The fish bowls were in a box here for a long time. I knew she wanted them hung, but I was ambivalent - not about the fishbowls, but I kept thinking we were going to get married. Maybe "hoping" is a better way to phrase that; in any case, we couldn't live together in her apartment (too small), so we would be moving into a new place once we got married. And it didn't seem to make sense to really settle in if we were going to move (soon?). At least so I thought. But I want to be agreeable, I want to help; and she wanted the fishbowls hung again. It felt, to me, like giving up: this was her way of saying that she was staying in her own place. But I drilled the holes and made sure they were level and secure, and went to the pet store for her and bought fish. And she was happy, and I like it when she's happy; I like making her happy.
She wanted a shelf, and sent me designs for the shelf; but she didn't want me to simply make it. So together we worked on the shelf: I showed her how to use the different power tools, and we cut and drilled and made a little shelf. (I did some of the work, including cutting the big circular hole where the jar is - more on that in a moment.) Then I showed her how to paint it, and how to put the poly on. Then it was dry and ready to hang: a new shelf, that we made together! That felt really good, a shared project. More than that, we started talking about other places to put shelves, and what might go on them. It felt really positive, even though - and this was always in the back of my head - it continued to feel like she was settling into her own place, rather than planning on moving into our place after our wedding.
(This doesn't quite fit into this story, but days before she broke up with me, she was also telling me about new eye surgery techniques that I should look into - that also felt like "making plans for the future.")
So, fish, the shelf, and then hanging the prayer flags and the bells - both of which she bought on our trips together out of town. It's a neat little wall, full of happy things. And I like seeing her happy, I like helping to make her happy.
This little wall, with all its decorations, ought to make me happy. Now it just serves to confirm the worries I had: she was settling in for a life without me.
PS: I forgot to come back to the jar when I first posted this. She needed a wide mouth jar for this project (so that it wouldn't fall through the hole we were drilling) and I had one in my apartment. What had it been holding? Mustard seeds (I cook a lot of Indian food, so I always have mustard seeds around). If that doesn't ring a bell, then come back: the mustard seed features prominently in the sermon I plan on posting tomorrow.
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