Saturday, December 14, 2013

The Fish Game


One obvious key to the success of a relationship (in our case, a marriage) is plenty of laughter. Susan and I laugh all the time, one reason being we both enjoy being very silly. Both at home and in the outside world, we try to have fun and act daft in the most mundane, everyday situations. There are undoubtedly times when people have thought us lunatics, like the neighbours who have surely witnessed us dancing like loons (usually favouring the 'disinterested indie hipster dance') to pop music in our dining and living rooms. But we don't care! Life is short and we're going to cram in as much fun as we can until our time is up or, as Jim Morrison so eloquently put it, "the whole shithouse goes up in flames."

In our silliness all sorts of things can pop up as the result of an idea, then continue unabated until whatever it is has run its course. Take 'The Fish Game,' for example. Like many folks we have an aquatic-themed bathroom, containing all manner of art and objects relating to the ocean. Amongst this stuff are three small rubber fish, which I cannot for the life of me remember the source of. There are two small goldfish and a blowfish that glows in the dark. Running around the middle of our shower wall is a small shelf where we keep the shampoos, and around the top is a narrower shelf. Until recently, the blowfish sat on the outside corner of the upper shelf; until a few months ago, the goldfish were sited on the middle shelf.

One morning back then I climbed into the shower to find that Susan had positioned the goldfish facing each other, lips touching like Kissing Gouramis. I laughed out loud, thinking how lovely it was, but spontaneously and immediately thinking what fun it would be to place them somewhere else that would cause amusement when Susan next entered the shower. So I put one on top of the soap holder, and one balanced on the showerhead. Long story short, this routine has continued on a daily basis ever since, each of us finding new and increasingly inventive places for the goldfish to go and consequently be discovered. Particular fun is had in placing one in an obvious, though never before used place, and one somewhere harder to find. I love hearing Susan laugh out loud when she finds a goldfish tucked away somewhere, as I sure she does me when I discover the elusive rubber creature.


I don't know why it took so long, but just last week I decided to introduce the glow-in-the-dark blowfish to these ridiculous proceedings. To announce his arrival, as it were, I placed him in a very obvious place on our clamshell sink. Susan was delighted, instantly proclaiming that he was in plain sight because he didn't yet really understand the game or know 'the rules.' She also lent him a very excited voice, saying, "Look! Here I am, over here!" As inflated blowfishes tend to, our phosphorescent little fellow has a fixed wide-eyed, open- mouthed expression, so his excited voice suits him well. When Susan placed him somewhere equally obvious for me to discover, she gleefully squeaked for him "Look! I was over there, but now I'm over here!" However, as you can see from the image above, by plonking himself in the soap holder blowfish is catching on by being a little more imaginative in where he patiently waits to be found out.

All this may sound utterly ridiculous from a man approaching his mid-50s and a woman in her late-40s, but it keeps us young and laughing. There can never, ever be anything wrong with that, eh? But bathrooms being of limited space and hiding places, we will in time need to dream up some other silliness, perhaps still in the bathroom, though maybe elsewhere in the house. Even when that happens, it would seem the fish may carry on regardless, as they seem to be having a whale of a time!