Well, well, two new living creatures join the Bedlam Farm family, actually three if you count the bottom feeder. There are two goldfish, Frida and Diego, and the odd looking sucking catfish Boris. Plus two small black snails, called Bumblebees.

This started as a surprise birthday present for Maria, who loves to watch fish swimming. I got one goldfish in a tiny tank. Then there were two goldfish and some snails, the tiny tank was too small. Now there is a 10 gallon tank, a crackerjack filter and quiet aierator pump. The bubbles add a lot.

Fish were a huge part of my young life, I had a half-dozen 25 gallon tanks and bred the fish, performed surgical procedures to save their lives, and created beautiful and exotic environments. I was God, they were my kingdom.

I spent countless hours holed up in my room landscaping tanks, supervising mating, rescuing and incubating babies. It was a truly insane ritual of obsession and withdrawal and hiding, and a truly horrible way to spent years of one’s young life.

I did not expect to have fish again, but there I was, in deep conversation with a fish geek salesperson at a Petco store, choosing live plants, artifical plants, colored gravel, an air pump, a filter and an overhead light, along with various drops and algae pills.

I worked all afternoon to get the tank up and then transferred Frida and Diego into their more spacious and well-equipped homes. We put the tank on the table where  we eat our meals together in the living room, we moved a larger table down from upstairs and have plenty of room for our food and Iphone charging pad.

We had dinner – I went out for Asian takeout from Bennington – and then sat for an hour or so watching the fish acclimate, check out their new surroundings, and seemingly flourish. I was careful to acclimate fish and water to the room temperature and let the water sit for a day or so.

It all came back to, even as I began to receive messages from the great digital beyond advising  me there were filters to keep the tank clean,  that the fish need to be fed or they will die, and the usual horror and grieving stories about illness, death and evil spirits.

I like the tank, I want to move the plants around a bit. The fish look quite happy and busy, and I felt as if I was rushing back in time. Maria said in her chair and we had a meditative few minutes – the fish do make me calm, that also came back – and Maria announced “I love watching these fish, I just love it.”

So the fish are back for a reasons, and these fish are not those fish, and I am not that poor and lonely but obsessive boy.

In many ways, life is a wheel that just turns and turns. Everything is there for a reason, and nothing that ever happens really goes away for good.

When the fish experience ended in a series of thermostat heater explosions that destroyed every tank I had and every fish in them, I knew then that this was for a reason. I  had to get out and face the world. I never looked back or paid attention to fishes in tanks again, that world was dead to me, or so I thought.

But I was wrong. The fish are back also for a reason, I will pass it along as soon as I figure it out.

The tank is pretty, and I love to look at them too, at least for  awhile.