A big fish named Clyde

The latest addition to the accouterments at Castle Bradow on the Grand Prairie is a goldfish pond. My better half has been wanting one for years and now it is in place and functioning. Our sons purchased a pond kit for their mother for Mother’s Day and she installed it in our back yard with minimal help from me.
As far as keeping pet fish is concerned, this is something I did long before I met my wife. Although I didn’t keep gold fish. I preferred exotic tropical fish. and when I say exotic, I mean odd.
Gold fish always seemed a little mundane for my tastes. The aquariums I kept as a young man were occupied by the most unusual swimming critters I could afford. I suppose the oddest was a carnivorous Asian minnow called a balinesox. but my favorite was an 18 inch long, five and a half pound South American river fish called an astronautus oscellatus. Aquarium hobbyists had trouble wrapping their tongues around that name, too, so the common name for these beasts is Oscars. They are great pets, although they present some rather unique problems. For one thing, you need one heck of a big aquarium to handle a fish that size. Also Oscars are messy eaters and require live food. But they are among the most intelligent of Aquarium fishes and usually develop something of a personality.
Mine was named Clyde and he was a character. When he was about five inches long and still a juvenile, he learned to jump out of the water and take a worm from my fingers. I had to stop doing this trick with him once he got big enough to take the fingers along with the worm.
Clyde also recognized people when they came into the room. He knew me as the guy who brought the food, and learned to associate my wife, Roxanne, with vittles once she became a member of the household. This was understandable. Any living thing with a modicum of intelligence, which is about all a fish can have given the size and simplicity of their brains, can learn to associate certain phenomena with food.
But Clyde had a thing about pretty girls. Before he learned that Roxanne would give him food, he thought of her as another pretty face. Whenever an attractive female entered the room where his aquarium was located, Clyde would begin to behave in a most scandalous fashion. Oscars have a complex mating ritual in which the male, which Clyde definitely was, performs a kind of aquatic dance to attract a mate. This involves flaring his gill covers open wide to make himself appear as large as possible, then vibrating his tail up and down very rapidly. What this is supposed to signify is probably best left up to your imagination, gentle readers.
Anyway, Clyde had an eye for well turned leg as they used to say, and would go into his mating dance whenever a pretty girl came into the room..
Roxanne eventually became accustomed to being flirted with by a fish, but some of her friends from college were somewhat nonplussed when they came over to visit. They would ask “Why is that big fish acting like that?” The answer would usually embarrass them.
The young woman who “introduced” Roxanne and me, Terry Patterson, was greatly complimented by Clyde’s display of affection. She thought it was “cute.” The really funny thing was when she got engaged and came to our apartment with her fiance’, Clyde would become enraged. He simply could not stand having a rival, especially one who didn’t swim around in a tank where Clyde could get at him. How Clyde knew who this guy was, was beyond me, but he knew. Clyde hated Bennie, Terry’s fiance’, with a bitter passion.
If Bennie got too close to Clyde’s tank, Clyde would try to come out after him. He did himself some injury running into the wall of the tank and once knocked himself silly. He knocked the top off the tank a couple of times. We finally had to weigh the lid down to keep the silly fish from hitting the floor.
Things worked out for the best in the long run. Bennie and Terry have been married for over 20 years now and they also have two sons (must have been something in that Memphis water back in the 70s). Clyde has been in fish heaven for almost that long. You see, really big aquarium fishes have a tendency to develop cancers.
Terry was visibly upset when she was told of Clyde’s demise, but I explained there was no future in their relationship. For one thing she couldn’t hold her breath that long