"And this moment, too.Once upon a time, back at Darrow-Harker School, Beatrice Hartley and her five best friends were the cool kids, the beautiful ones. "And this moment, too." Another three seconds. And what could be more exhilarating than seeing the world for the very first time, in all of its beauty, almost thirty thousand times a day? How glorious to know that your Golden Age wasn't forty years ago when you still had all you hair, but only three seconds ago, and thus, very possibly it's still going on, this very moment." I counted three Mississippis in my head, though I might have rushed it, being nervous. Their closets are light filled and skeleton free. No moping over missteps, slip-ups, faux pas or disturbing childhoods. Everyone pities them for only remembering their last three seconds, but in fact, to be so forcibly tied to the present - it's a gift. The most incredible thing about goldfish, however, is their memory. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they're abandoned. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately.
They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. It went on to live another forty-seven years. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America - a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice - luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts - the guppy, the neon tetra - go belly-up at the first sign of trouble.
If you live like a goldfish, you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. In his defense, though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen-minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. People don't think twice about swallowing it. I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life, not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus - though I'm sure they're helpful - but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish.
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