The Aquarium Incident

A post from a FB friend: “Generally speaking, kids, when you put a hole in my wall, you need to tell me. Trying to cover up the evidence will only make matters worse. Just sayin.”

Your story reminds me of an incident which happened when my brother and I were nine and ten or so. My mother and father both worked, the income necessary even then to piece together the ability to pay the bills for three kids and a small house.  I am the middle child and my sister, a year and a half older than I, was assigned the role of babysitter and though she took it quite seriously that often did not work out well. She was perhaps a bit distracted by the phone and all, and my brother and I were as untamed as the wild horses of Ocracoke Island. Rough housing, raised voices, door slamming and other assorted knocks and bangs were common sounds around the house. My brother and I loved each other like, well brothers, and we are best friends to this day, but we were constantly fooling around, wrestling and so forth, until one or the other of us would receive some sort of minor injury, which inevitably escalated to the previously mentioned raised voices and door slamming.

It was a small house and in the aftermath of whatever petty incident a tinker toy was picked up and hurled by one of us at the other. I think I may have been the thrower, but with years of memory in between it matters not who did the throwing and who was doing the escaping. It could have been either of us on either side. Alas the little wood toy missed its mark, but blasted through the side glass of a 25 gallon aquarium, maybe two inches from the bottom of the tank. Within seconds there was water and fish flopping all over our parents prized and long sought after wall to wall living room carpeting. Believe me there was no covering up of the evidence. If I try I can still recall the absolute terror at the calamity of it.

The hours leading to Mom and Dad’s arrival home were torture. We had an electric garage door opener, easily heard in our back bedroom, which my father dutifully used every night. When you knew you had done something wrong and heard that grinding door open slowly well it might as well have been Green Mile time with the door clanking closed and the echo pervading the house.  

Neither of my parents were uncomfortable with physical discipline, but for “special occasions” like this it normally would have fallen to my father to hand out justice. That night though all we got was a long talking to and the dreaded “We are very disappointed in you…. I am very disappointed in you.”  Believe me, I would have rather had the belt. Even at the age all three of us kids had the understanding vague that it may be that both Mom and Dad were struggling hard to create a safe and warm place for themselves and their children. It was a house with inexpensive, but very comfortable, furnishings. It was lovely and lived in and safe and wonderful. And it sat in a neighborhood of houses butted up against it on all sides which were exactly the same. Even now I can recall a number of little bric-a-brac items my mother selected with love and care, placed carefully here and there, which did not survive the youth of my brother and I.  A colored-water blown glass swan set, very popular in the day, was met with demise and my mother’s now famous utterance, “I can’t have anything nice around here.” Later in anticipation of a disaster which never came, my father would tell us, as well as some of the neighbor boys who were part of some of the destruction over the years, that he would “come down on us like a black cloud” if we broke a glass framed picture poster hanging in the stairwell of the second bigger home. All in all you have to give credit to my parents. Despite the relative destruction my brother and I wrought they remained forever optimistic and continued to buy things to make our home look and feel nice.

Those are memories of 45 years ago or so. Both Mom and Dad are gone now, but the aquarium incident was retold from our various perspectives over the years. Each time small elements are remembered with slight variations, all of it now part of our family lore. Who threw the toy, the punishment dispensed, how each of us responded are all elements of the story recalled somewhat differently by each of us. But at the center there is so much love these small details matter little.

You seem like a good mom, so I’m sure you know this, but it’s all good. These are the things that weave the fabric of your family, indeed the tapestry of your lives together. In the years that follow your memory will mist over and some part of the story will be less clear than others, but what will remain will be the love that enveloped all of you in these years. At least that’s the case with me. What I wouldn’t give to go back there just for the shortest of stretch of time, to drink it all in again, just to be around that noise, that chaos, and that love.