When I was 5 they gave me the turtle. I don’t remember asking for one. I didn’t name it Myrtle (that was Mom: “Here. Meet Myrtle the Turtle”). I associate the creature’s presence with my terrible tonsillectomy but I also have a dim memory of a second turtle, for Steve, so maybe it was not a get-well gift but one of my father’s lessons in responsibility.

Or maybe it was connected to Dad’s appreciation for things marine. He’d soon bring home the first aquarium, and a decade later he’d take up scuba and free diving and then sailing. Whatever the cause, I briefly had a small turtle in my room in Glen Cove, in a round clear shallow bowl with a little hump of an island Myrtle could climb, and a fake palm tree.

I never warmed up to Myrtle, and she (if a she) never seemed to notice me.

After turtles came the aquaria. That started in Chula Vista and included plenty of equipment and scientific method. Dad taught us the names of the species he kept bringing home while they were acclimating in their plastic bags. He showed us how to remove the fish babies before their parents ate them. He enlisted our help when he tested the water. He scraped the glass walls, introduced snails and catfish and other algae-eaters, tried fish-doctoring, taught us “ichthyology.”

If anyone loved those swimmers it was Dad; we never did.

The third experience came around 1988. Katie brought home a carnival-prize goldfish that didn’t die.

We dumped the fish (there were two at first) into a small bowl and one of them gave it up within days. We acquired two more and they didn’t make it either. But the one (PB Moe) thrived. After a bit I acquired another, bigger, classically-shaped fish bowl, and the fish continued. Finally I went to The Sharper Image and spent an inordinate sum on a plexiglass column of a fish tank, complete with pump and light and colorful fake plants, and installed fish and tank in the living room.

This went on for years. Finally the day came when old PB wasn’t looking good. The tank was algae-free but the goldfish was definitely slowing down.

I didn’t want to watch that fish die. I didn’t want to flush PB down the toilet. When it was just barely still alive I removed PB from the tank. I took our old goldfish to the back yard and gently released it into Codornices Creek. Who knows? That fish might have made it.