As work continues on the fishpond, Beemer has taken to spending more and more of her time, both by day and night, staring into the water at the fish.
There are three golden orfe and three shubunkin. (There was also a small Mystery Fish, but we’ve lost track of him — he may have been lost during a pool-cleaning accident in March. But he’s almost impossible to see, he’s so small and dark. He may be in there and doing just fine.) But now I find myself going out every morning, and every evening, to check that there are the same number of fish that there were previously.
I feel like the Count. “One! One golden orfe! Two! Two orfe! Three! — no, wait, that’s the same one I just counted. Okay, let’s start again. One — two — Will you guys stop moving around??!” …Yeah, right, tell the fish to stop swimming. And Beemer just crouches by the water, on her favorite fish-watching stone, and keeps watching.
Last night Peter went out with a flashlight and came back in after a while, saying, “I only see two orfe…” So I spent the night waking up every few hours to wonder whether Beemer had indeed eaten one of them. We’d thought, earlier, that we might have some trouble along these lines with the blue heron that fishes in the big pond behind the house — the “hern-cran”, as Peter’s friend Charles likes to call it — but the hern-cran (a) couldn’t find anywhere shallow enough to stand in the little pond, and (b) is highly unlikely to spend much time tyring to find a good standing-spot when any one of four cats might come along at any moment. And now it seems it’s going to be the cats who’re the problem, not the hern-cran. …I had always said, “If the cats eat the fish, we’ll replace them.” But I find I’ve gotten attached to these guys, after watching them grow over the past couple of years. Replacing them would be no problem…but I’d miss the first ones…
Out I went first thing this morning to do the Count Thing. One, two, three golden orfe. Three golden orfe: yayyyyy! Everybody’s where they should be. Big sigh of relief.
Beemer is presently sleeping near me on the Patagonia fleece throw on top of the couch. But she won’t be there for much longer. Pretty soon she’ll wake up and go back out to sit on the fish-watching stone again…
While I’m thinking about the Muppets: the other day, on TG4 (that’s the Irish-language TV channel here) I saw one of the more mind-bending things I’ve seen lately: the Muppet Show dubbed into Gaeilge. It loses something, if you ask me. But worth noting is the fact that the voice talent dubbing Kermit into Irish does, if you ask me, a much better Kermit than Jim Henson’s son does. Astonishingly better. I’m sorry I didn’t tape it, in retrospect. Oh well…next week, maybe.
