The Hand Of God And The Fish Religious Revival
I may have mentioned before that I have a pond full of koi. And when I say full, I mean full. My female koi Freckles did a very good job this year of making babies of all colors and dimensions. Feeding these koi is a joy and a pleasure. In fact, this ritual has become part of my meditation practices. The koi are more than happy to eat out of my hand. I can touch them, push them, play with them, pretty much do anything with them, and they are happy to play along. Koi are easily bored, so these little playtimes are actually good for them as well.
One day, Hubby-Poo was watching me feed the koi, and being the funniest guy on the planet, he softly commented, “Look, Fred, the Hand of God.”
I laughed. None of the koi are named Fred but I knew Hubby-Poo was about to launch into one of his many spoofs.
Hubby-Poo pretending to be a koi: “No, really, Fred. If you go to the surface of the water and you move your mouth like this, the Hand of God comes down and food falls into the water. All you have to do is swim around, then put your mouth out of the water like this, and the Hand of God gives you food. It’s really cool.”
Fred Koi, acting skittish and uncertain: “Uh-uh. I’m not doin’ that. Just the other day, I saw Pete doing that and then, woosh, he just got sucked up into the air and disappeared. No one has seen him since.”
“He got Raptured!” I crowed, happy to go along with Hubby-Poo’s spoof.
Hubby-Poo, still pretending to be a koi: “He was the chosen one. Now he’s closer to God.”
I giggled my butt off. I love it when my husband does his spoofs. He’s loads of fun on long car trips.
I’m still trying to train the koi to jump out of the water and grab the food from my hand. Sort of like the dolphins do at Sea World. I can see it now: I can open my own theme park. I’ll call it the Koi Experience. Kids from all around can come and feed koi, touch koi, and see koi do tricks. Hey, it could be a whole new career for me. Koi training!
We have quite a lot of different animals that flock to our backyard. I call them the Gimpy Menagerie. We have a one-eyed cardinal, a box turtle with a deformed shell, a hawk that has no balance and falls off limbs on a regular basis, a fish that doesn’t know how to eat, a deformed koi, rabbits, moles, baby bald eagles, raccoons, lizards, snakes…and a squirrel that doesn’t know how to hide her nuts. I swear if it weren’t for us, she’d starve. She’s funny to watch. She takes a peanut, slobbers on it to mark it as hers, then tries to tuck it into a crack in the patio floor. She looks at it this way and that, gives it a pat as if to say, “yeah, that’s good right there” and off she goes. She doesn’t seem to realize that the peanut is in plain site, and another squirrel simply comes along, picks it up, and eats it. For the past two years, she has never figured this out. We call her Hammy. This year we had the pleasure of watching Hammy raise two babies. Funny enough, one of those babies has learned to do exactly what Hammy does. I was in the yard one day and almost stepped on him; he had hopped up and was standing right behind me, up on his back legs, looking hopeful with one paw out as if to say, “hey, got anything?”
The squirrel was barely out of the nest. How the hell did he learn Hammy’s technique so fast? And of course, my husband has to offer his comments.
Hubby-Poo pretending to be Hammy: “Okay, son, watch closely. If you go up to those humans, and you sit up like this and put your paw out, they’ll give you food. It goes like this…. Now, you try it. And don’t forget the paw. The paw really gets ‘em. And if they’re not around, just go up to that big glass thing over there and look inside. That’s where they live. If you put your eye up to the glass, they will come and give you food. Just don’t forget…the paw, and the eye…. And be sure to look sweet, hopeful, and as pitiful as you can. They love that.”
Hmmm…I seem to attract gimpy, wounded critters…of every variety. Still, flawed as they are, we love ‘em all.
Copyright 2008 C. D. Blizzard
C. D. Blizzard is the author of the novels Blackwater, Broken, and Profile.
