Aunt Jaki has a knack for picking out toys my kids will love. Whether she spends $100 or $1, her gifts are always the hit of the party. Last year, she put a gooey clown fish toy in Corbin’s Easter basket. He named it “Mr. Pettybone Fish” and for the next 10 months that thing went everywhere he did. It slept next to Corbin in bed every night, traveled to and from school with him, went to Atlanta for long weekends, and even ventured to Canada for a couple weeks in the summer.
Corbin loved that fish raw. By mid summer he was missing a piece of his tail. By autumn all his stripes had worn off, giving him the appearance of a gold fish. And by the holiday season Pettybone fish had no tail at all and had sprung a leak in his side. It was at this point, when Pettybone started to leave a trail of tiny plastic beads wherever he went, that Chris and I made the painful decision to ‘flush the fish.’ Of course being the sentimental cowards that we are, we didn’t actually get rid of the body. We just hid it in the laundry room and told Corbin it had been moved to a place where it would be safe until we figured out how to fix it. (like cryogenics for clown fish) Corbin handled the separation reasonably well, but he still asked me about Mr. Pettybone Fish every time we got in the car to go to school, and occasionally when he was in a forlorn mood.
So fast forward to this Easter. Aunt Jaki, who has been looking for a Pettybone replacement ever since the stripes wore off of the original, happened to venture into Target in search of toys for the boys’ baskets. The original Pettybone came from Walmart and had apparently been discontinued, so she had all but given up hope at that point. But as she was sorting through a bin of gooey snakes, lizards and dinosaurs, she happened to come across one solitary gooey fish. He was a bit dirty after months of living in the bottom of a toy basket, and his stripes were white with blue lining rather than black, but Aunt Jaki knew that these minor defects wouldn’t matter to the little boy who had long been missing the cold squish of a gooey fish in his hands.
And come Easter Sunday, Corbin’s reaction did not disappoint. Upon seeing the toy he squealed with delight and ran to thank his beaming aunt. He was later found curled up on the couch in the formal living room, whispering sweet nothings into Mr. Pettybone Fish II’s invisible fishy ear. My mother of course tried to turn the miraculous clown fish recovery into an analogy about the resurrection, but we all agreed that this was quite sacrilegious and chastised her for being a hieratic.
Happy Birthday Benny, my crazy little two year old boy!
