Relatively Minor
Laughter does not have to come from a major source. It could indeed be ... relatively minor.
This is a fish tale, not from the banks of the mighty Mississippi, nor the edge of an Iowa farm pond nestled in the back forty. It is not an exaggeration, nor is it so strange and surprising that it seems unlikely to be true.
Six women arrived at the Iowa Arthritis & Osteoporosis Center in Urbandale and chose seats in the waiting room adjacent to the testing lab. Directed by their attending nurse, they waited patiently for their names to be called and blood to be drawn. The seating area had a large rectangular aquarium in the middle, intended to calm patients before and after seeing the doctor. The women’s chairs surrounded three sides of the tank.
As the women waited, they discussed the range of aquatic species in the tank, and the fish story began.
“That fish looks like Nemo, or whatever it was they called him,” one of the six commented, referring to a small, slender orange fish with big white and small black stripes undulating from side to side through the water.
“I certainly wouldn’t want to be responsible for cleaning that tank. It is way bigger than the goldfish bowl I remember having as a kid,” the woman on the west side of the aquarium acknowledged.
The other women unanimously agreed it would be an enormous task.
“It would be like a full-time job just to keep that thing clean!” one woman chimed in.
“I remember when my daughter had a hermit crab,” said the lady seated next to me. Setting the bait, she lured the other women into her experience as they listened to her tale.
“It always swam too close to the aquarium filter, got caught, and we would have to rescue it,” she said.
“I know exactly what you mean,” another acknowledged from the other side of the tank. “We had the same problem,” she said.
I couldn’t imagine living life in a fishbowl where everyone is watching your every move. However, fish traversing the aquarium that day seemed rather unconcerned amidst the crowd of curious onlookers.
“I wonder if they ever sleep,” one woman pondered.
“Of course, they do,” I said. “Where do you think they got the idea for the water bed?”
And that was the end of the tale, hook, line, and sinker, as the women heeded the call and took their seat in the lab.
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