A fish story

One late spring evening, we were enjoying the warm weather by eating dinner on the living room balcony. From the living room balcony, the balcony on Molly's room at the opposite corner of the apartment is visible (as in the photo). We noticed a string hanging off Molly's balcony with a piece of paper attached to the end of it. It looked for all the world like a fish.

"Is that a fish?" Molly's parents asked. "No," was the response. "I didn't put anything on the end of that string, so it certainly couldn't be a fish."

This was during a period when Molly's veracity had been occasionally impaired by what she wished were true. So, the fact that it really DID seem to be a fish both puzzled and saddened her parents. "Why would she lie about something as silly as this?" they wondered, yet nonetheless they felt that they might have to make this into a Teaching Moment if they had caught Molly in a Fishy Fabrication.

But Molly persisted: "Look, I'll go get it and we can see what it is." The object she brought back is shown in the picture at the left, and was made from an adult French person's scrap paper. It had quite clearly been tied to the string by someone with a sense of humor in the dentist's office below Molly's room. We all laughed long and hard when we realized what had happened, and Molly created a very fancy new fish to dangle, along with a note of thanks, in a protective plastic sleeve.

The dentist loved it, of course.