Yesterday I got what I estimate to be my 2,255th lesson as a father. I determined the lesson number by taking the number of days since Drake was born. I figure I have learned at least one new thing about being a father since his birth. Honestly, I think this number is very low. I could easily add a lesson for each day each one of my 4 kids have been in my life and that would put the lesson number at 4,611. But who is keeping count of lessons. This was just one more lesson of many that I will have during my life.
So, here is the lesson. It was a simple math lesson in the form of a word problem. Not 2 + 2 kind of easy, but still easy. Follow along.
My father bought Emmy Kay a goldfish for her birthday and she named him Chum. It promptly went fins up within a few days so I went out and bought her a new fish. She named him Chum too. I figured Chum Too would find a ride on the porcelain train within a few months and we would be going into Wal-Mart and spending another $.28 on Chum III. There was only one problem, Chum did not go belly up as quickly as we believed. Instead, he kept eating and growing. 9 months later and he is still around.
Here is the problem. About a week or so ago, Chum started to get a bit lethargic. Then he started to just look bad, kind of distressed. I am not a fish whisperer so I did not really have any clue what was going on. For three or four days, we thought Chum would take his final gulp (?) and be done with it, yet every morning we would wake up and Chum would give it another day. I changed his tank water and he started looking better. Then, Chum's tail started to look bad and it began to fray. Next thing we know, it has all this "fuzzy" stuff on it. I looked online and found out that Chum had fin rot. Great. I did not know what fin rot was or did, but it sounded bad. It has rot in the name and reminded me of trench foot. I read online that I could get some medicine to put in the water and hopefully make it better. Now for the math. I went to Wal-Mart to buy the fish rot fixer stuff and there I stood...I could buy the "stuff" for $3.00 or a new fish for $.38 (yep, inflation has even hit the goldfish market). If I could bring myself to send Chum on the porcelain train alive, then I would just buy a new fish, however Emmy Kay wants her fish to feel better. That means Even though the math would dictate buy a new fish, I went ahead and spent 8x the value of a new fish on the medicine. Why? Because Emmy Kay wanted it. Dad math don't make sense.
Now, I have brought the stuff home and put it in the tank. It appears that it made Chum take a turn for the worse. Yesterday, his rear fin fell off. It came off in pieces during the day, but it is now gone. We have a goldfish with no rear tail. It is a funny looking fish. Not haha funny, sad funny. He is still able to swim around, but he is not moving around a whole lot and I think his days are numbered. I now call Chum..."Stumpy."
I fear that when my test gets graded (and Stumpy is gone) I will find out that I should have just bought a new fish.
