Nonfiction by Ron Theel
It was one of those old hotel restaurants. The kind that lets you select your “fresh seafood” from aquariums grouped near the entranceway. I went past it daily on my morning walk but never considered eating there.
Today I stopped. A large fish was swimming erratically near the surface of a small, rectangular tank. I needed to have a closer look. Growing up, I always had aquariums. I liked the challenge of creating and maintaining my own aquatic world: balancing predators with scavengers, separating egg-layers from live-bearers, maintaining the correct pH and temperature levels of the water.
This aquatic world offered a refuge from my father’s athletic world. He played high school football and enjoyed participating in boxer fighting while in the army. “You have to play a sport,” he demanded. “All high school boys play sports.” My pleasure came from the chess club and the debate team. My father’s world remained unexplored.
I recognized the large fish as a sturgeon. For a fish fanatic, the signs would be hard to miss.
An elongated, torpedo shaped body with lines of bony, armor-like “plates” that stretched along smooth, scaleless skin. And that distinctive, rounded nose punctuated with two tiny barbell whiskers to help locate food.
The tank was too small for the sturgeon. Too short as well as too narrow. The fish was too large to turn around by simply swimming in the opposite direction. The top of a sturgeon’s tail fin is longer than the bottom. This distinctive feature enabled the fish to flip itself over by using the top of its tail, enabling it to swim in the opposite direction. It was the only way to reverse direction since the width of the tank was so narrow. Swim about two body lengths, bump the end wall of the tank, flip, and change direction. The motion reminded me of the technique a freestyle swimmer uses to turn around when arriving at the wall of a pool.
Over the next two weeks, I frequently paused at the fish tank. The sturgeon always followed the same turning pattern. Bump the end-wall of the tank. Flip. Reverse. I felt an overwhelming sadness. There was no choice for the sturgeon whose life had to follow this endless, compulsive pattern.
I wished that the fish would somehow disappear. Go belly-up. Be plated-up. Perhaps a miraculous rescue by an animal rights activist. But there was no such drama.
I’ve come up against walls many times. Learning how to live with epilepsy. Bump, flip, change direction. A broken marriage. Bump, flip, change direction. A bankrupt business. Bump, flip, change direction. There are often bumps along any journey. But I’ve been fortunate. People were always there to hold the net for me, to help me change direction and get on with my life: family, friends, therapists, doctors, nurses, and many others. I thank God for all of them.
One morning, I decided not to watch the sturgeon. I’d seen enough. That evening, I returned to the place where I thought I would never eat, the place I came to know as the “fish tank restaurant.” I looked straight ahead as I entered and seated myself. There was no need to read the laminated menu resting in front of me. The waiter approached and asked, “Are you ready to order, sir?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I’ll have the sturgeon, please.”
Ron Theel is an educator, mixed media artist, and freelance writer living in Central New York. His work has been published in Lake Life and Rustling Leaves Anthology.
