The Lighter Side of Loss

We didn't lose much to Hurricane Rita. Money has been and will continue to be spent on things ranging from food replenishment to home repairs to new clothing.
However, Fishy McFish, a 5-year-old chunk of wedding cake and a 16-year-old bottle of South Texas white wine cannot be replaced.
Fishy McFish - one of those black, bug-eyed goldfish with a fin display that made him look like a Chinese junk ship - was a present to my son, Curt, on his second birthday last year. He was a frisky, friendly little fish with a personality. At feeding time, he'd come to the side of his bowl and wag enthusiastically, like a dog that's happy to see you. You could even poke a finger in the water and pet him.
While securing the house the morning before the storm struck, I thought about taking Fishy McFish with me, up to my temporary newspaper-office home. But he didn't look so good. He was turning from black to gold, and his signature wag was looking a little lethargic. Perhaps he knew what was coming and that the end was near.
So I sprinkled some food in his bowl and wished him good luck.
The next day, hours after Rita had subsided to breeze-and-drizzle status, I went home to check out the damage. Sure enough, Fishy McFish was belly-up in his bowl.
Poor little guy. I can't imagine the stress he went through during the howling winds, particularly when the 100-foot pine tree smashed into the roof above him.
He was a great little fish, and I wish I could have given him a proper funeral, but the toilets weren't working, so Fishy McFish's final resting place became the gutter in front of the house.
Now about that wedding cake.
Amy and I married in July 2000. The marriage of the millennium. On our first anniversary, we'd forgotten to pull that ceremonial wedding-cake chunk out of the freezer. The next year, we forgot again. Then it became a tradition to not eat it.
That elderly, freezer-burned piece of cake was one of the few items I salvaged when I got rid of the perishable food the morning of the storm. For two days, I kept it in a cooler tucked under a desk. When the ice ran low, I stuck it in a back deep freezer in the company kitchen.
The deep-freezer food managed to stay frozen for days and days following the storm. Periodically, I checked on the cake. Had it thawed, I was going to eat it, for symbolic reasons. The cake must be eaten.
But then tragedy struck. After power was restored, someone went into the kitchen and cleaned out the refrigerators, freezers and ice makers. The cake was gone. I made a half-hearted effort to dig through the trash, but it wasn't there, either. A tradition shattered.
OK, and now for the bottle of wine.
During the early 1990s, I worked as a reporter for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. A fellow reporter came back from doing a story on a South Texas vineyard. She gave me a bottle of white wine. A haphazardly drawn label decorated the bottle. The wine, bottled in 1989, according to the label, had a lot of sediment in it. I assumed taste quality was minimal.
For some reason, I kept that wine all these years. It had no sentimental value attached to that period of my life. I don't even remember who gave it to me.
Nevertheless, I've been lugging that thing around for more than a decade, through three different jobs and four housing moves.
Since spring 2001, it had been sitting in the wine rack in our bar. Occasionally, I've wanted to pop it open and taste it, but then I decided to leave it alone, maybe for another 60 years. I'll drink it on my 100th birthday and then probably die.
Last night, however, I went into the bar to get some wine and noticed that the old wine bottle had made its own decision. The cork, looking like something found at the bottom of the Titanic, was pushed out, within a millimeter of popping.
So I grabbed the bottle and a wine glass and headed to the kitchen for the final uncorking. The contents didn't look like wine. It looked like Beaumont water three days after Rita. I assumed sitting in a swampy house without air conditioning for days had taken its toll.
I poured a glass and took a mouthful. It wasn't bad, really. And it was strong, too, more like whiskey than wine. I didn't want to ingest it, so I spit out the mouthful and poured the rest of the wine down the sink.
I got what I needed, though. Having lost the wedding cake, I sure as hell wasn't going to get screwed out of at least tasting that crappy old wine.