Hey — Remember Fish Day?

I am thinking about fish.

I am thinking about all the fish I have known.

I am thinking these things as summer ends, and remembering one large day that happens every summer in Port: Fish Day.

If this event is news, you must not live in Ozaukee County.

and, reportedly, the largest fish fry thrown anywhere, as the entire city is converted into a massive fish fry. But, I am not blogging about the story of the festival.

If you want to partake of that, get down here yourself next summer. Words do not suffice.

I had some guppies. I had a few goldfish before that. This is every child's initiation to our tail-waving, shimmering, goggle-eyed, gaping-mouthed little friends. The gold fish died and we dealt with them in a ceremony that has now become almost universal.

The Flushing of the Fish.

But the guppies were the first real serious fish I had, and, more importantly, lived in the first rectangular fish tank I owned.

The tank was the most exciting part. Guppies, as you may know by now, actually have "exciting" bred out of them. Guppies are the dull ghosts of the aquatic realms — translucent, small and apparently all clones of one another; they do very little, rather like people with average senses of humor at a gathering of relatives.

I am wandering back and forth like a guppy tail here. I was thinking about fish and I remembered my guppies and I remembered how unmemorable they are. I don't remember a specific guppy at all.

I never named them.

Guppies exist as a group, as a little cloud, shifting slowly, dissipating, eventually all ending belly up at the top of your little tank. At first their x-ray bodies are interesting to kids. You see their stomachs and some other stuff, but then you grow tired of seeing guppy guts.

Guppies — let's face it— are boring.

Even guppies find one another boring and eventually die of boredom. Curiousity seems completely foreign to them.

Well, OK — that wasn't a very good fish story (no, I am not going to say fish tale just to get a groan). But it wasn't as bad as it could have been. It wasn't a story about raking alewives on the shores of Lake Michigan.

If there is any content in my recollection it is this: as we think about fish, as we remember the ways we sang and danced this summer, the times we paraded about — the ways we reveled and rocked ... let's not think about guppies. It's not a big message. Like a guppy, it is rather small.