The Story of the Green fish

Once upon a time, Meg and Matt decided to get married. So they sent out invitations to all their friendsandrelations and pretty soon folks started to send gifts. Well, Meg’s side started to send gifts. And they sent pretty ordinary gifts, as weddings go: china and crystal and wineglasses and relish trays, the usual stuff. Then one day, the first gift arrived from Matt’s side of the family: a box from Cousin Sharon. Now Cousin Sharon lives in a cabin in the woods in Maine. A huge custom designed cabin in a big chunk forest near Camden, but a cabin in the woods nonetheless. You see, Sharon used to be a big exec at Fox Studios, developed a new idea known as the Fox Network, of which some of you may have heard, and she was married to a big wheel stock broker, but then he got Addison’s disease, wherein your adrenal glands shut down so if you get a big shock or rush or are otherwise het up, your heart stops because there’s no adrenaline to keep you going. So quitting stock broking seemed like a good idea, which he did, and they sold everything in Los Angeles and took it all to Camden Maine to retire in comfort. Now, when a gift arrives from someone who you know has enough money to sell everything and move to Camden Maine, your first guess is that that gift is going to be a pretty good one. So Matt and Meg were all psyched to open up the box and see what the rich cousins in the woods in Maine had sent. So they opened it. It was (and still is) a flat piece of wood, cut out in the shape of a fish, painted in what is charitably known as the "primitive" style in various more or less non-coordinating shades of green. "Look, sugar," said Meg doubtfully, "it’s a…green…wooden…fish." "No it isn’t," said Matt. "It isn’t?" "It’s an UGLY green wooden fish!" And so Meg said a couple of ThankyouJesuses because now she knew they could still get married because if nothing else their taste in ugly green wooden fish was the same, and I bet you never knew that that could be a basis for continuing a marriage but now you do. But that’s not the end of the story. Because every wedding has it’s "what was the weirdest present you got" story, and this is ours, so we’ve told it a lot of times. But over the years the green wooden fish, which frankly as far as we could tell had no aesthetic or any other value whatsoever, has grown to mythic proportions. What started out being used as a trivet on a good day and a bookend on a bad, acquiring burn marks and scuff marks and tomato stains along the way, has evolved into a leitmotif, with its own glassware, serving trays, wine bottle holder, production company, business cards, and Christmas ornaments, which is a set of developments that no one could have foreseen when we first started to tell the tale. There has even been a fable with a moral lesson written about the green fish (and you can find it on this website in the near future). People we have never met say "Oh, you’re the green fish people," and we are compelled to acknowledge that yes, we are. Our baby has green fish design clothes and our dog has a green fish toy, which is pretty scary if you think about it. There’s no particular moral lesson here, but I will say this: sometimes, in the oddest ways, a little cluelessness, a little wackiness, can make your friends laugh, make you a little money (Green Fish Productions is $283 to the good so far this year!), and oh yeah, change your life. Later y’all.