Romulus: The Old Man in the Sea

My name is Romulus and I'm an Asiatic Veiltail Carp or goldfish. I am 13 years old! I could live to be 25!

I am over a foot long now! Most people do not realize how long goldfish can live if they let us.

My human rescued me from a tank full of goldfish meant to be turtle food or food for bigger fishes. She brought me home and added me to her 10 gallon fishtank which was on top of her piano.

Well, I disappointed her bitterly when I killed all of the Angelfish and Swordfish in the tank with me. She wasn't that knowledgeable about fish, otherwise she would have known that I would do this--plus there was just enough room for me in that tank!

However, she admired my strength and beauty and took very good care of me. Each night, she would practice the piano--remember my tank was on top of it--and I would critique her playing. When she would make a mistake, I would thrash angrily and stare viciously at her. So she would try very earnestly to play beautifully. I especially loved Chopin for his flowing notes to which I would stretch my fins and yawn quite widely! I do NOT like Bach though because his music is so choppy, that is more for humans than fish!

Making Waves to Music

At the end of each practice session (some of them lasted eight hours or more), my human would play my own special song she always played just for me. I knew then that she was finished practicing and would wag my tail. Yes! I do! That song was Mozart's "Ah Tutti Contenti," from The Marriage of Figaro.

After five years of being in that tank, I had grown to be nearly six inches long and my human decided to get me a bigger tank. I moved into a 29 gallon tank with large blue gravel which I enjoyed piling into mountains and rearranging every week. My human was now becoming much smarter about fish care--measuring the pH in my tank and adding only distilled water during water changes, which she'd do every month.

Someone to Call My Own

But I was becoming lonely. My human now had two parrots to whom she was paying more attention. She didn't come over as often and pet me (yes, she'd put her hand in the tank and I would swim under her hand for a pet). So she decided to get me a mate. That brought Rhiannon, the egg-shaped goldfish, into my lonely life. Rhiannon grew very quickly and soon was the size of a honeydew melon! We became very chummy but needed more room so we moved again--this time into a 55 gallon tank! Now I'm over a foot long!

I still listen to my human practice the piano when she has time. We have known each other 13 years now and that is a long time for a fish and a human. I know her parrots pretty well too. They like to look at me in the tank and I like to look at them. I'll swim over to near where they're sitting and weÕll stare at each other communicating and exchanging ideas. It's fun!

Taking care of me is a LOT of work and is also expensive. My human has to spend nearly a whole day a month cleaning my tank and measuring ammonia and nitrite levels in my water. She is careful not to use tap water in my tank, which can contain residual chemicals from winter runoff (do you humans really drink that stuff?) which can kill me rather quickly. Actually, once I got tuberculosis from this and my human nursed me through it. Not many fish survive that! She was vigilant though and I made it!

pictured above: Romulus, the goldfish, lived to be 13 years old!

Communicating With Fish

Animals have been trying to communicate to me all my life as they try to do with most people, we just don't get it. I guess one of the first times they really got through was when I developed a relationship with my goldfish, Romulus. Yes, it was rather a shock to get communication from a fish, that was the last place I expected it to come from. But it made sense, really because these fish were kept as pets for centuries by the Chinese and I was just discovering why.

The first thing I noticed about Romulus after he had grown rather large were his soulful eyes. Then I would notice his reactions to the music I played on my piano. He showed a distinct preference for some types of music which when played he would stretch his fins out and 'yawn' as fish do when they are supremely content.

Romulus dances to the sounds of Chopin He seemed angry, too, when I would make a mistake or play a type of music that did not have a flowing quality to it, like Bach. Sometimes, if the mistake was particularly displeasing or the music very choppy, he would slap his tail on the water's surface and splash me! It is hard to deny that interspecies communication is going on here!

Romulus became ill one year with tuberculosis and required lots of medication and careful water changes. He survived but spent much of the time hunched in a corner. I would sit by this corner and put my face up to the glass and wave a finger at him. He would wave a fin back at me.

There was now no question in my mind that we were 'talking' to each other. But I had no idea what we were saying. I just knew he could see me and recognize me and would wave to me. I also became fond of petting him. Yes I would put my hand down into the tank and as he swam by, I would gently touch his scales. He didn't really react to this, he didn't try to avoid the contact though. His scales felt slimy of course but also smooth as silk and this fascinated me.

I became very attached to this fish and his mate, Rhiannon, and my memories of them will be ones I always treasure. Romulus lived 13 long years and before he died, he went back to his corner until the end. After he was gone, Rhiannon spent a lot of time in that corner too, grieving for her companion, a fish.

Mozart Chronicles: Reality or Something Like It

Practical Advice on Modern Living from a Geriatric Cockatoo
Sometimes I tell people how Mozart talked to me, out loud, in English, in complete sentences and fully cognizant of what he was saying, and I get a half-cocked grin in reply, especially from people who have parrots themselves. The ones who have parrots themselves get mad or jealous. Their parrots don't talk to them like that, they say. "Well," I reply, "maybe they don't because they know you think they're just a bird brain or that you think you're some advanced being when actually it's them who are the advanced being."

That's usually the end of the discussion. But sometimes I know the person is a true bird lover, who really does admire the intellectual capabilities of their feathered friends. And to them I say, "Well I think that maybe deep, deep down part of you doesn't really believe they're as intelligent as yourself. You maybe think they are somewhat intelligent but you still think you're smarter." Then that's usually the end of the discussion. Then there are the two or three people I've met and heard about over the years, who believe in the deepest parts of their soul that their precious feathered friends are not only equal in intelligence but also in every other way. And those people and I get really excited when we talk to each other because we've had similar experiences. Then there are those people who nod silently, who 'know' but are afraid to speak up for fear of being labeled a nutty bird owner. And lastly there are the people whom do have these experiences with their feathered friends and simply ignore them, unprepared for what it may mean.

Fourteen Years of Silence Broken
I don't know why Mozart decided to start talking to me this way. He'd never spoken before in his fourteen years of captivity until the day we brought him home. I feel he sensed my deeply seated belief that his life and my life were on equal planes. But, as I've noticed some animals do, he probably watched the movie of my life which is playing above my head in my crown chakra in an endless rerun and saw that one day when I was eighteen years old and walked into a pet store. I hurried through the store looking for a certain kind of fish food for my goldfish, Romulus, when I came around an aisle and stopped dead in my tracks. There in a much too small cage, as is so often the case, in front of me, was a majestic Moluccan King Lory looking out at me.

His eyes held me captive. In them, I saw an intelligence, a sentience, a depth and a sorrow of which magnitude I don't often even see in the eyes of my fellow humans. I choked, his sorrow filled my heart with a profound sadness and a sense of injustice. This is the surge of clairsentience that any true animal lover is familiar with. For weeks afterward, his eyes haunted me. I never forgot him. Today, my heart still pangs with remorse for the fate of this gorgeous, wild being who should have soared his whole life over the mountainous gorges of Seram, Indonesia. So maybe Mozart saw that moment in my life, or other moments like it when I've connected with a nonhuman intelligence and been haunted for days and weeks afterward and been forever changed, forever pivoted into another being's point of view and unable to ever really go a full 180 degrees back to my own, wracked by some gross injustice I was powerless to stop.

But talk to me he did. Not very much at first, just simple stuff like saying 'thank you' and requesting favorite foods. I noticed his pronunciation was not that great though and I set about to help him speak more clearly. Parrots learn more about mimicking the sounds of human mouths by watching how those mouths actually form the sounds than by listening to them. So one afternoon, I set about to teach him one of the hardest sounds for a parrot to make, the 'b' sound, a plosive, as it's called. With my mouth close to his, as he hung off the side of his cage, I said distinctly, "Mozart, you have a black beak. Your beak is big and black," emphasizing the b's. He turned his head to one side and zoomed a big black eye up next to mine and said slowly but clearly in a sweet little voice reminiscent of Felix the cat, "And you don't have one?"

An Intelligence That Mirrors Our Own
My eyes opened wide and my jaw loosened and then dropped. I stared into his eye for a moment or two. In that big black eye, I saw glimmers of wisdom earned from years of jungle living and untold, harrowing adventures in short quick flashes. I thought about how this incredible bird was older than me, older than my parents even, and smart enough to be able to engage in conversation with a totally dissimilar species. But I didn't want to lose this moment. I fumbled and thought 'what do I have instead of a beak?' I parted my lips and bared my teeth, "No I don't have a beak, I have teeth," I said and tapped on my front teeth with my fingernail to show him the hardness of them. His focus turned to my teeth which truly fascinated him. He leaned out, reaching his beak forward and gently tapped one of my big front teeth with the curve of his huge beak. The two biological tools we shared, meant for rending food in some manner, clicked together and then he straightened up. His question was answered. He understood.

During that first week he shared with us, we immediately learned he abhorred any type of activity with the slightest hint of violence to it. One evening we sat back to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Mozart. A favorite scene came on in which two knights engaged in a standing joust. As the knights heaved and hoed back and forth between thrusts of their lances, Mozart imitated and leaned back and forth and groaned and moaned much like anyone you might see watching a prizefighting match. Then one knight put his lance through the eyehole of the other's helmet and gallons of blood then gushed forth out of the lanced knight's helmet. Mozart froze, looked at both us to see our reaction and then screamed! He screamed and screamed in protest until we finally acquiesced and changed the channel. This type of violent entertainment was totally unacceptable to him.

The Parrot Pacifist
We soon learned that other unacceptable, seemingly violent, programming included basketball, hockey, and football. Any hint at all of physical contest and especially prizefights were totally unacceptable for us to watch with Mozart. Even if my husband, Christian, and I were to watch television downstairs with the volume turned down, he still knew what we were watching. We finally figured out he could see everything we could see and hear regardless of where we were physically. He would scream with a loud, angry shriek that was truly deafening. Even cracking an egg to make scrambled eggs on the weekend would elicit an angry shriek from the little Buddha Bird watching us in his mind's eye from upstairs. Our penchant for blowing away virtual people and creatures on my Playstation was just as unacceptable. Finally I would explain to Mozart over and over again, "Motz! (pronounced Motes) They're not real! It's ok! They're not real! It's just a game (movie, etc.)." After several years, Mozart was able to handle television violence and Playstation games a little better but he still had a tolerance threshold. During that time we discovered the antidote for all this horribly upsetting behavior was to watch ballet or Riverdance or some such programming. Elvis movies were a favorite. He stood transfixed in front of the television gently swaying his head back and forth in the true Moluccan cockatoo waltz as he watched Celtic dancers or ballerinas seemingly float across the stage, and Elvis too.

The Humorous Buddhist
As Mozart loosened up a little with his Gandhi-like approach to life, he displayed a sense of humor too. Playing with Chris one evening, he playbit him softly on the thumb. Chris seized the opportunity to admonish our little peace loving friend, "Hey you bit me!" he cried to Mozart in mock indignation, "I thought you were a Buddhist!" Mozart swung his head out near to Chris' and said smilingly, "I am!" After living with Mozart for about four years, I had come to rely on him for practical advice on daily living. Thinking he could foretell future events, I asked him about returning to a job I had very much disliked. "Pat," he said sadly, "don't go back." I ignored his wise advice and went back to that job, needing money very badly at that point. Six months later, I lay sleepless in my bed, pulling my hair out as I reviewed the day's events of working at an abusive corporation. Agonizing over the verbal abuse I dealt with daily, I could think of nothing to ease my mind and remove the heartless corporate vampires from my thoughts. At last, around 3am when all hopes of a restful night's sleep were lost, Mozart piped up from his cage, next to my bed. "Pat!" he said softly, gently, "they're not real."

Relief from Reality
Nothing in the world could have relieved my mental agony at that moment, nothing! But those three little words caused me to burst into hysterical laughter! I buried my face in my pillow and laughed as heartily as I have ever laughed in my whole life!

Of course he was right! They really weren't real! They were just hollow shells of non-awareness, judgmental sticks in the mud, stuck in the drudgery of the corporate rat race! They were just caught in the matrix of a slave world where people expend almost their entire lives in pursuit of the bottom line trapped behind a desk for fifty or sixty hours a week like captive birds in a pet store. I was still real. I hadn't sold out and lost my humanity in the process and caused others to suffer mental agony for the purposes of my own advancement on the corporate ladder.

I had learned from my sweet feathered friend that there is an entire reality of intelligence and altruism existing in natural harmony with the universe, the world of nature. I had learned that animals and every living being attunes easily, with almost no effort, to the universal intelligence to achieve whatever goal it sets for itself according to its desires. I had learned that wild animals living in nature were as evolved as they wanted to be and that we seemed to be more a pawn of our own evolution than truly free within it. The real world was the world where Mozart had come from, the rainforest, and in that place, spoken language is not a measure of intelligence, it is a veil that conceals the meaning of life which is simply to feel alive. I went to work the next day and put a sticky note up next to my computer monitor which read in large, bold letters, "They're not real." When the corporate vampires walked by, they saw it and looked unsettled. Who knows what they thought. It was their turn to lose some sleep.