Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I’ll begin.
Once upon a time (actually it was on June 5th of this year) in a faraway place called Eleele, a man, whom we’ll call Curt Carish for want of a better name, was enjoying a picnic by the sea with a friend. Sitting close to the water his eyes drift downwards and he noticed a fish swimming in a rather odd fashion close to the shore. Armed with the knowledge that little or none of their alcoholic beverages had leaked into the sea to inebriate the fish and thinking perhaps more of an inexpensive barbecue supper rather than as to whether or not the fish was actually a barracuda or some obscure species of shark, he leapt into the water with his tennis shoes on and his wallet in his pocket and started to beat the hell out of the poor inoffensive fish with a bamboo pole his picnicking friend had handed him.
As it turned out, it was a ten-inch reef fish called a nenue with a rather fat belly and without further thought about the possibility that it was a heavily pregnant mummy fish, Carish came back on shore and rather unceremoniously threw it into his cooler to accompany the other items one usually finds in a portable cooler at a picnic.
As happens so often in cases like these, there wasn’t a policeman around to arrest the man for premeditated murder, nor was there anyone from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) to admonish him for dispatching a pregnant fish to Valhalia to join the Valkyries.
A little later Carish’s friend, who we’ll call Allen Hall for the want of a better name, went to the cooler probably to take another beer to appease his guilty conscience as an accessory to murder. And what did he discover? The poor nenue had a bad case of indigestion, not to mention the terrible headache from the beating it had taken, and had regurgitated (that’s a polite way of saying it threw up) a gold watch. “And the funniest thing is that the watch was on time and still ticking,” Carish said as if the entire episode was a joke.
No, I’m afraid tales don’t come much fishier than this one do they? Not that I’m doubting the frightful events described here, but I’d like to know what happened to the fish. And did Messrs Carish and Hall got their comeuppance from the Fisherman’s Guild of Hawaii for bludgeoning to death a poor defenceless nenue? What’s of even more importance in this really fishy tale which has until now been completely ignored, what was the brand of the watch?
If it had been a Rolex, we’d certainly have heard about it not only from the murderous Mr. Carish, but also from the Public Relations department of the brand. And what of the provenance of this mysterious timepiece? The leftovers from a recent shark attack? A one-armed swimmer losing his grip? A boating accident? As to the watch, it is clearly water-resistant to at least a metre since the water was waist high when our intrepid clubber leapt into the sea, it is either gold or gold-plated and appears to have a bulky fitted bracelet of the same metal. Send your thoughts on a postcard to our Editor.
I told this story recently to Alberto my Italian plumber, who sagely nodded his head and prompted him to tell me another fishy story about his neighbour’s son whom he saw in the garden filling in a large hole. Intrigued he asked what he was doing.
“My goldfish died,” the boy replied tearfully, “and I've just buried him.”
"That seems to be a rather big hole for a goldfish,” Alberto remarked.
Patting down the earth rather brutally, the boy replied, “That's because he's inside your bloody cat!”
Of course I laughed so Alberto took the cue and said, “I’ve got a story for your magazine about a watch.” “Great,” I said, “tell it to me, I’m a bit short of material for this issue.”
“Well,” Alberto began, “it’s about an old Italian Mafia Don whose dying. He called his grandson to his bed and said, I wanna you listen to me. I wanna you taka my automatic pistol, so youa always remember me.”
“But grandpa,” the boy said rather sadly, “ I really don't like guns, how about leaving me your Rolex instead?”
“Now you listena me. Some day you gonna runna de family business, you gonna have a beautiful wife, lotsa money, a biga home and maybe a coupla bambinos. And somma day you gonna come home and maybe finda your wife in bed with another man. Whatya gonna do then? Pointa your watch and say, ‘Times up!’?"
Well you’ve got to laugh haven’t you?
Have a great summer; hopefully life will be back to normal after the holidays!


Source: Europa Star August-September 2009 Magazine Issue