But Enough About You: Essays Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Freeze!” or “On the ground, NOW!” and the unholstering of Glock 9s. Director Freeh looked up at the sign. He seemed momentarily nonplussed. Possibly, it had been a while since someone had told him to shut up.
    “Oh.” He shrugged. And then, simply and without fuss, got up and moved, along with his meaty, scowling entourage, to one of the Unquiet Cars.
    How I savored my little triumph. If I get an obituary, I hope the second paragraph will note, “He is said to have once shushed the director of the FBI.” Yes, this is how I should like to be remembered.
    — The Daily Beast , December 2008

FISH STORY
    My wife, in her wisdom, decreed that we must have a fish tank in our bathroom. Like Rumpole of the Bailey, I refer to my darling as She Who Must Be Obeyed. So the only answer was “Darling, what an excellent idea. I am so excited to have fish in our bathroom.”
    I did not utter aloud the next sentence that formed in my mind: “How convenient for flushing them down the toilet after they have lived to the ripe old age of forty-eight hours.”
    She settled on a 38-gallon tank. It looked impressive. But even more impressive was the filtration system that theoretically keeps the water clear, so that you can actually see the fish. There is apparently some very deep thinking going on in the fish-tank-filter department. Ours looks like it could keep a human alive during open-heart surgery. And—as I found out when I had to disassemble it—you could almost certainly use it to cause a human being to die. Horribly. But I’ll get to that part in a moment.
    My darling was very excited. Together we picked out tchotchkes for the tank: plastic plants, a little fake coral head, more plastic plants, and of course the obligatory sunken ship and Diver Dan.
    Then the colored gravel, the bling, if you will, of the aquarian world. We chose jewel tones: deep purple, crimson, with hints ofturquoise. It looked gorgeous. But the best part of the gravel was yet to come. (More on that, too, shortly.)
    What had we forgotten? we asked ourselves. Fish!
    We selected a half-dozen goldfish of a type called ryukin, which sounds like an island that might start a war between China and Japan. Ryukins are hardy and comical-looking: fat little rascals, some with quadruple tails. Personality? To spare. Beguiling? Beyond—and then some. Whenever I come into the bathroom, which being sixty years old I do quite often in the course of a typical day, our ryukins wiggle those quadruple tails like Las Vegas dancers. Little minxes!
    How could I resist constantly feeding them? It says on the food container—I quote—“Feed fish several times a day, enough for them to consume in three minutes.” Within weeks, the ryukins were the size of blowfish. Not that you could actually see them, since the water was now opaque, as if someone had dumped a quart of buttermilk into it.
    The lady at the fish store berated me for constantly feeding them. When I protested that the label said to feed them several times a day, she replied truculently, as if dealing with a mental defective, “Of course it says that. They want you to buy lots of food.” Oh, I replied.
    But the most fun part was cleaning the filter and the gravel. This was my “punishment” for being so stupid as to follow the feeding directions. And here my education continued, for now I learned the reason for all that gravel. The gravel acts as a sort of repository for what the fish didn’t eat; and, of course, for what the fish did eat. But the gravel was merely the amuse-bouche. The main event was cleaning the filter.
    Fortunately, my beloved has a medical degree in both infectious and tropical diseases. So when she observed the considerable quantity of . . . let’s just call it “matter” all over me, she was able to declaim knowledgeably about the types of infections I was most likely to come down with: Bacterial seemed to be the winner, as opposed to viral, parasitic, or toxic. Of course, then