Happiness of Fish Read Online Free

homeroom teacher enthused about the new religious education text that had come out that year. In the meet-and-greet afterwards, Gerry had suggested the book didn’t give much space to anything but the home team.
    â€œCouldn’t it be taught like herpetology?” Gerry asked the teacher, a youngish version of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on
The Muppets
, round and bland and up-to-date.
    â€œHow’s that, Mr. Adamson?”
    Gerry could see him riffling through a mental card file of “ologies,” trying to place herpetology.
    â€œSnakes, right?” He looked at Gerry hopefully, expecting a joke perhaps.
    â€œI mean,” Gerry said, “that it’s a grand thing to know all about snakes and have a serious enthusiasm for snakes, but the goal isn’t necessarily to graduate snakes at the end of the course.”
    The faux Honeydew said that was an interesting point and went on to talk to somebody else.
    Gerry has a friend, Philip, who hangs out in the coffee shops and is a sceptic who wants a funeral. He says most religions demand that he take on faith the existence of a giant pink rabbit. Empirical evidence of the big pink bunny strikes him as being in short supply, so he’s moved away from organized religion. Still, he says, there’s no reason that a sceptic shouldn’t have some inspiring words read over him. On and off, he is cherry-picking his way through the ancients, east and west. He’s gathering snippets of text that he says should do for a humanist send-off. However, he feels classic Buddhism is bleak, and Taoism and Zen are a bit slap-dash and happy-go-lucky.
    â€œLackadaisical even,” he says, looking at the Chinese notebook like Gerry’s, where he writes down his snippets. Gerry told him the shop to buy them at.
    Gerry also has a story about “lackadaisical.” At his work, he tells Philip, they have to transcribe the clips of people speaking that they put in radio pieces. Some reporter, who went to school after spelling stopped being a subject and apparently didn’t read a lot, transcribed “lackadaisical attitude” as “lack of daisy-go attitude.”
    â€œThat’s what I suffer from,” Gerry told Philip. “A lack of daisy-go attitude. I can’t remember the last time I had even a touch of daisy-go attitude.”
    Philip continues to gather final-sounding aphorisms. At the moment though, his hypothetical funeral features a lot of Marcus Aurelius and Confucius.
    Sitting in the church library listening to people stay sober through Christmas, Gerry feels that Philip’s pink rabbit is over-represented on the bookshelves. There should be more Marcus and Confucius and a section on what to do when your daisy-go goes.
    When the meeting breaks up and Gerry goes outside, it has started to snow. He brushes off his grubby little SUV and drives home through big snowflakes like flower petals, daisy petals maybe, daisy petals going.
    On a Saturday when Vivian has gone Christmas shopping, Gerry goes to the basement, passing under the plywood duck-shape he cut out and stuck over the stairs as the international symbol for “duck.” He roots in his cabinets and desk drawers for the scribblers, notebooks stamped with glass and cup rings like old passports. He makes piles of paper, sorting by period, mood, or degree of physical damage, reconstructing how he got here.
    Call this the CFA pile, Gerry muses as he unearths a nineteenth-century looking duplicate notebook that he’d found in his mother’s house on a visit a couple of years before. It’s the kind with one-sided carbon pages that automatically left a copy of what was written. In it he’d printed a bunch of poems by hand. Today it seems impossible that there was a time when he didn’t type, when ballpoint and carbon seemed the best way to leave smudges of a human-shaped animal on the cave wall.
    Gerry pours a coffee and looks at his come-from-away self