How much is that fishy in the baggie?
by Susan Anderson
When my daughter joined 4-H, I didn’t imagine that the first animal we’d encounter would be a goldfish.
I was picturing long afternoons of learning to care for and train horses. My daughter Anna considered trying to tame our golden retriever sufficiently for the dog show. There was even talk about showing a friend’s heifer.
All the animals I pictured were mammals with fur or hair, and they weighed more than 50 pounds.
But at the 4-H Carnival in Casper last weekend, the line at the minnow-racing booth was at least as long as the one for pony rides. The place was packed and noisy, so when Anna asked casually if she could compete in the minnow races, I told her, “Sure.”
How was I to know that the prize for winning the minnow race was a goldfish?
And who could predict that Anna would be a champion minnow racer?
Minnow racing, for those unfamiliar with the sport, involves blowing through a straw behind your minnow to encourage it to reach the end of the long trough of water before the other minnows in the race.
Anna was just in the groove at Saturday’s carnival -- she couldn’t lose. At the end of it all, she had won two cakes in the cakewalk and three goldfish prizes from the minnow races, each in its own plastic baggie.
It was an unexpected blessing, to say the least. Certainly the cat’s quality of life has improved dramatically. She has reacted with glee, spending hours staring fixedly at the fishbowl, then racing around the room as if she were chasing a posse of mice before returning to her spot by the bowl.
One of the fish seemed listless and after a day, we were sorry to see that it died. When my husband scooped it out of the tank and headed for the garbage, Anna was horrified.
“Aren’t we going to give Bubbles a traditional burial?” she asked.
“Traditional” turned out to involve saying a few kind words about Bubbles, followed by flushing down the toilet. My husband said, “Just for the record, when I die, I don’t want a traditional ceremony.”
Toilet paper champ
In addition to the minnow races, the toilet paper throw was highly popular at the 4-H Carnival. Contestants were handed a mallet. They brought it down with all the force they could on a contraption that then catapulted the toilet paper roll through the air.
Three porta-potties were the intended targets. This was a game of delicate skill, and I didn’t see anyone hit the most difficult porta-potty.
As a newcomer to the 4-H scene, I was impressed that the real work was done by the kids. They put in two-hour shifts at their booths, which wasn’t an easy task, believe me.
There doesn’t seem to be much whining at 4-H, and the kids were getting a good lesson at putting in their time at assigned tasks. If the jobs were leading a pony around a ring over and over, or serving blue slushies, they had the added motivational value of teaching kids to work hard enough in school to get more interesting work in the future.
It reminded me of the job I had one summer that turned me permanently toward a college track so that I would never, ever have to do this job again in my life.
I served lemonade at the Allegheny County Fair. For eight hours. At the end, my hands were sticky and my feet swollen.
I’ve never really liked lemonade since then. But I remain open-minded about goldfish and enthusiastic about what surprises await at the next 4-H Carnival.