From: AB - 99 Watcher -, Buenos Aires, Argentina
To: All Parents on Mother´s Day South of the Equator

“The Fishes House”

“I loved my father. My father knew everything because he had swept back and forth across the world many times. He knew stories of winds and creatures like nobody else.

One of our favorite strolls was taking a walk on the riverfront to look around among the fishermen. Some of them greeted us and I always asked their permission to look inside the buckets where the fresh catfishes were still gasping in resignation.Sometimes my father shared a mate tea with the fishermen. The mate was made with water from the river and even when he was too gringo to like it, he took it anyway because he had learned in this land that you should never refuse one.
While walking and in whispers so as not to bother “the catch” I was asking him things about life that he answered to me in long stories also in a low voice.

I had to relearn some of those lessons later in my life but there´s one that still guides me.

In the middle of the river were some buildings like islands with no land. From my height I always saw three. The Río de La Plata was so wide that I stretched my neck and stood on my tip-toes hoping to see more of them because my dad had explained to me that there were many. I was certain that he could see them all from his 6′6″ height.The buildings were brick cubes with roof, door, windows and even when there always was somebody swimming at the beach side no one was ever seen near them.
- Dad, what are those?- Those are the fishes homes. The fishes go do their b´ness during the day and then at night they go home to sleep. Just like us. - Don´t they go at siesta time?- Fishes don´t have siestas like we do. But sometimes they go durin da day when some folk blows on the other side of the planet.- What happens when somebody blows on the other side of the planet?- It happens that the air rolls by and turns into winds. If da blow is strong enough there might even be hurricanes. Did you feel da breezes in the Summer nights? Well, it´s da fluttering of da wings of da butterflies in China, ´cos they are awake and fly, ´cos is daytime there.

Years passed and I became and engineer. I learned that the fishes houses where the intake of the drinking water supply for the city of Buenos Aires. It was hard to digest. More years passed and I gave up engineering and resumed my environmental studies from that very lesson. I understood that the waters of my river travel throughout the planet like the winds and can bring back home stories of other creatures.
My father never knew anything about global warming, toxic spills in the river, dead fishes by contamination, acid rain. The latest technology he enjoyed was the Telex.
But he surely knew about the Chaos Theory, the delicate and unpredictable poetry of the natural relationships and he was a firm believer on word of mouth power. He would have been an active blogger.
He would have written a good post on environment today, on Blog Action Day .”

99 Watcher