In my last post I confessed the shame and guilt I felt for having accidentally murdered unborn sea monkeys in my youth. But as it turns out I'm not so alone in my residual self-loathing after all. After reading the post, a good friend came forward to share the pain she feels over the demise of her own sea monkeys. Seems that my friend, whom I will call "Lissa" (since that's her name), purchased sea monkeys many years ago as a Christmas gift for her daughter, who was four at the time. It was all very innocent and well-meaning, Lissa told me, and her daughter was enchanted with her new little pets. In a perfect world, the story would have ended there: happy child, frolicking sea monkeys, a shimmering new batch of lifetime memories for all. But as we all know, the world is far from perfect. I'll let Lissa explain just how far from perfect it is.
"My daughter went to her father's for the weekend," she recalled, "and she was very worried about the sea monkeys being all right while she was gone. And so the next morning, when I came downstairs and saw the flourescent cover of their bowl lying on the floor, I knew it was going to be bad."
You see, unfortunately for the sea monkeys, and for the little girl who loved them, Lissa's household also included one of the many Weimeraners that she has owned over the years. And while most Weimeraners are high-spirited, curious dogs, the one living in Lissa's house at the time was apparently very thirsty as well. So thirsty that it had taken a long draught out of the sea monkey bowl in order to wet its whistle, and, naturally, the defenseless little brine shrimp inside the bowl were sucked down its parched doggie throat as well.
And so what did Lissa do? Well, what any guilt-ridden, but resourceful mother would do. She re-filled the sea monkey bowl with water and sprinkled pepper in it, hoping that her daughter would mistake the pepper flakes for frolicking brine shrimp. And apparently she did...until Lissa's son happened to notice that the brine shrimp were conspicuously non-frolicking.
"He looked at me and said, 'Mom, I think these sea monkeys are dead,'" Lissa told me, her expression reflecting the discomfort the memory still managed to evoke.
Despite Lissa's feelings of residual guilt, the years since the tragic demise of her daughter's sea monkeys have washed away most of the pain for all involved. Lissa has a new Weimaraner who eats plastic instead of drinking sea monkeys, her daughter is a young woman now with much more on her mind than the welfare of brine shrimp in a water-filled bowl, and the sea monkeys...well...with any luck, they're having the time of their little after-lives in an aquatic section of heaven. But it just goes to show you, no matter how bad you feel, whether it's because of your role in the death of innocent sea monkeys or something else...you're never really alone. Someone, somewhere, is even more stupid than you.
Skol!
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