The Goldfish and the Game

Arthur sat in his favorite armchair, the worn velvet familiar against his back, watching the baseball game on cable television. The Dodgers were playing, and even at eighty-two, he kept score in the notebook his wife had given him forty years ago. On the side table, a small glass bowl caught the afternoon light, inside it a single goldfish swimming lazy circles.

His great-granddaughter Emma had won the fish at the county fair last week—six years old and already possessing the determination of her grandmother. "He needs a good home, Grandpa Arthur," she'd said, pressing the plastic bag into his arthritic hands. "You're the only one who'll remember to feed him."

Arthur smiled at the memory.Emma didn't know that he'd once won a goldfish himself, back in 1948, the summer he met Catherine at Coney Island. He'd been seventeen, showing off in a baseball game with friends, when he noticed the girl watching him—her hair in victory rolls, laughing at something he couldn't hear.

"You play like you think the Yankees are scouting," she'd told him later, sharing saltwater taffy on the boardwalk. He'd won her a goldfish that day, though they'd both forgotten to feed it, and it had lasted exactly three days.

Catherine had been gone seven years now. He still talked to her sometimes, especially during baseball season. They'd watched thousands of games together—first on radio, then their first television set (rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil), then cable when it finally came to their neighborhood in the eighties.

The goldfish swam to the surface, mouth opening and closing.

"I know," Arthur murmured. "She would have liked you."

On television, the batter hit a home run. The crowd roared. Arthur carefully wrote it in his notebook, exactly as he had since 1962. Some things you didn't change—scoring, loving, showing up.

Emma would be by tomorrow to check on "Goldie" and maybe hear stories about the old days, when baseball was something you listened to on porches and love was something you won at county fairs and kept for fifty-odd years.

Arthur turned up the volume. The afternoon sun warmed his hands. The goldfish swam on. Some innings feel like they last forever, he thought, and then, suddenly, it's the bottom of the ninth, and you realize—you've had a wonderful game.