As long as the fish are OK
At the risk of this becoming a fish newsletter, I’m writing about the fish again. As you may or may not know, depending on how long you’ve been a subscriber, over Christmas we saved a betta fish named Jesus, and at Easter we experienced more Christian symbolism and welcomed some new fish but one of them died. Tears were shed and life lessons were learned. Well, turns out, those fish weren’t done teaching our family about life. They have been the main characters in our house during The Unholy Sweat-Stain Wave of 2025.
If you live in Northeast Ohio like we do, for the last week parts of your body that you didn’t know were capable of producing sweat have been dripping. We hit triple digit heat indexes. Roads buckled. Power was lost. At one point, we had three straight days of 90-plus, officially making it a “Heatwave,” as if 89 degrees waves any less heat at you.
This is the part where it’s important for you to know we do not have air conditioning. Our house was built in the 1930s. Back then, if you wanted to cool off, you removed five of your seven layers of clothing and laid down on a chaise lounge and fanned yourself and said things like, “I do declare.” People in olden times understood something we have forgotten – life is perpetual suffering, interrupted only by fleeting moments of joy that will ironically add to your suffering later. This ancient understanding, I think, is the main reason most homes didn’t have central air until the 1960s. When America became air conditioned, we lost something essential – mankind’s main thing to complain about. It’s no coincidence that this moment is exactly when politics became the main thing we complain about. Our nation has suffered for it since. What I’m saying is – we don’t have air conditioning because I love America.
The other reason we don’t have air conditioning is because I didn’t have air conditioning as a child AND WHY SHOULD MY KIDS HAVE IT ANY BETTER – WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE INTERNET OR MOO TUBES BACK THEN SO LET THEM SUFFER THROUGH HEAT AND PLAIN YOGURT.
We do have ceiling fans in the bedrooms, and floor fans to supplement the ceiling fans, and circulated air to supplement the supplemental fans. It’s good enough for about 355 days a year. But there are a couple days every summer when, yeah, I wish we had AC, and this week was one of those weeks. Normally, we power through, but this summer there was an added wrinkle – we were worried that the weather in Cleveland was so hot it would kill our tropical fish. If you’re looking for a sentence that explains the sheer lunacy of Cleveland weather, there it is. Cleveland is too hot for tropical wildlife.
We usually keep the tank at 74 to 76, but the temperature in our house has been higher than that, and the tank warmed to 80-plus. Fish can’t communicate, but if they could, I’m sure they would have said, “Please take us to a cooler locale – such as Thailand.” We talked to the fish store people, and they gave us ideas for countermeasures. We turned the tank thermometer down. We opened the top, which may have raised concerns inside the tank that people were going to cool off with a dip. Mainly, we froze bottles and bags of water and rotated them into the tank. We humans used plastic, in an unexpected twist, to save fish instead of destroying their habitat.
There’s a world in which, as a family, you get a pet, but it’s not the family’s pet because only one person really pays attention and cares about the pet, and that person becomes the pet’s long-term emotional hostage. The hope, if you have kids and a pet, is that the kids will take on the responsibility of caring for it, both as an exercise in maturity and so you the parent don’t have to because we’re already busy enough with work, the house, chauffeuring the kids, answering questions about whether Iran can bomb the U.S., etc.
In the midst of our ugly heatwave, a beautiful thing happened. The kids took the lead on icing the fish tank, grabbing frozen bottles from the freezer and swapping them in. They checked in on the fish personally to make sure they were OK. They asked about the fish when they were not at home. They showed actual concern for something in the world other than watching reruns of The Simpsons. I live with two little FEMA responders. A good attribute to have this chaos century. Proud of them.
The heat broke this morning, and I am now sweating at the standard rate of an Italian-American man, which still mean vast amounts of sweat, but I feel cooler. All living things in our home survived. We’ll never actually know if Operation: Plastic Can Be Good? saved those fish, but it was good for our family.
A few days ago, we picked up a portable air conditioner from a friend who had an extra one, and we’ll start using it as soon as we get a part we have on order. We already decided where it’s going. It’s for the fish. Because … America.
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This made me giggle, laugh and LOL.
Please keep it up. 👊