Kickass Sunday loaves and fishes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, doesn’t often tread the thin ice of religion, but this being Sunday and all, he listened as the keeper ranted some about a modern version of the “loaves and fishes” story in which a Japanese man paid $3.1 million for a 613 pound tuna to sell through his restaurant chain at $200 per serving. In the Biblical version of the story, seven loaves and two fish fed a crowd of 5,000, and there were 12 baskets of leftovers. In the modern Japanese account, if the keeper’s math can be trusted, some 15,555 would be fed by one fish, and the only thing left over would be a few bones, or maybe if you were to feed that many with one fish there would not even be any bone leftovers. The keeper found the whole thing depressing. Since his Sunday school days—even through his “falling away”, the keeper has lived with this image of Jesus as a great fisherman and baker performing before an unruly crowd demanding fish and bread. (It would seem like a good time for Jesus to have stepped up with his water-into-wine trick, but that’s an aside.) So now when the keeper thinks about fish and the masses, his old Sunday school image is tainted by that $3.1 million tuna and all those Japanese diners paying $200 for just one bite of it. Maybe later today, the keeper will manage more productive thinking, then again, maybe not. There was a time when he might have thought about going ice fishing, but he “fell away” from that too. Ah, Sunday with all of its fish imagery!