FOREWORD
I’ve always dreamed of raising fish at home. I remember that when* *I was little, I liked to hang around gawking at the fat, round, silver and gold fish that flapped their frail tails and fins inside the glass jars an old China Joe lined up on a board along with empty jerry cans of kerosene in a narrow blind alley off Yawarat Road, even though I couldn’t afford to buy a single fish to call my own.
Much time went by, many things happened in my life, yet I never gave up that wee dream of mine until I came by my first aquarium, by which time I was almost forty. I bought lots of silver, gold and other wise wondrous fishes of sundry species and in rapture watched them cavorting through the phosphorescent flailing arms of the seaweed.
I was especially thrilled when a small she-fish with a dark-red tail laid a blanketing of eggs on the water, but then what a shock it was to find most of them had been nibbled off by fish of other species within the span of a single night! I kept a watchful eye on the remain ing eggs until they hatch ed into fingerlings the spitting image of their mum, which reminded me of one of Dad’s riddles when I was a child. Dad asked, ‘What is it that looks like a giant but is smaller than a giant?’ We lucubrated till our brains went numb, but nothing doing. In the end Dad came up with the answer: ‘The child of a giant, of course!’
The sad thing was, how frail and weak the fingerlings were! From the very first day they started to flesh out up until now, I’ve got only one left and I’m not sure it’ll still be around tomorrow. But one thing I’ve learned from the fish fray is that life is no easy matter and keeping alive even in a cramped aquarium is a lot harder.
These days, whenever I look back at what’s happened in the various stations of my life, I find that on too many occasions I’ve erred unforgivably, on too many I’ve let things be and done nothing constructive, and there are too many occasions still that bear no thinking about.
No, life is no easy matter nor does it always balance, and keeping alive in the world is a lot harder. Yet, I can only hope you’ll understand and feel for the many lives caught cavorting in "Time in a bottle."
Praphatsorn Seiwikun
* *
FOREWORD
I’ve always dreamed of raising fish at home. I remember that when* *I was little, I liked to hang around gawking at the fat, round, silver and gold fish that flapped their frail tails and fins inside the glass jars an old China Joe lined up on a board along with empty jerry cans of kerosene in a narrow blind alley off Yawarat Road, even though I couldn’t afford to buy a single fish to call my own.
Much time went by, many things happened in my life, yet I never gave up that wee dream of mine until I came by my first aquarium, by which time I was almost forty. I bought lots of silver, gold and other wise wondrous fishes of sundry species and in rapture watched them cavorting through the phosphorescent flailing arms of the seaweed.
I was especially thrilled when a small she-fish with a dark-red tail laid a blanketing of eggs on the water, but then what a shock it was to find most of them had been nibbled off by fish of other species within the span of a single night! I kept a watchful eye on the remain ing eggs until they hatch ed into fingerlings the spitting image of their mum, which reminded me of one of Dad’s riddles when I was a child. Dad asked, ‘What is it that looks like a giant but is smaller than a giant?’ We lucubrated till our brains went numb, but nothing doing. In the end Dad came up with the answer: ‘The child of a giant, of course!’
The sad thing was, how frail and weak the fingerlings were! From the very first day they started to flesh out up until now, I’ve got only one left and I’m not sure it’ll still be around tomorrow. But one thing I’ve learned from the fish fray is that life is no easy matter and keeping alive even in a cramped aquarium is a lot harder.
These days, whenever I look back at what’s happened in the various stations of my life, I find that on too many occasions I’ve erred unforgivably, on too many I’ve let things be and done nothing constructive, and there are too many occasions still that bear no thinking about.
No, life is no easy matter nor does it always balance, and keeping alive in the world is a lot harder. Yet, I can only hope you’ll understand and feel for the many lives caught cavorting in "Time in a bottle."
Praphatsorn Seiwikun
* *
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