Household Object: Freshwater Aquarium, $800

Features:

• Weighs 850 pounds
• Contains seventy-five gallons of New York City tap water, ideal for fish because of its neutral pH, low mineral content, and minimal treatment
• Holds up to seventy-five inches of fish, or one inch of fish per gallon of water
• Often installed in dental office waiting rooms for its calming effect

When my dad moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, just a few blocks from where I lived with my mom and younger brother, he took his freshwater aquarium with him. My dad is an architect, but as a very young child I imagined that his true vocation was a caretaker for the aquarium. During the odd Saturdays I spent with him, we went on excursions to dimly lit Chinatown stores, where we squeezed through narrow aisles perilously crammed with display tanks, and paid repeat visits to the American Museum of Natural History’s Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, where a blue whale swims in suspension from the ceiling. I’d return home laden with chocolate, Pokémon cards, and plastic baggies of fish, separated by species, which my dad would set afloat on the surface of the aquarium, releasing them only once he was satisfied they’d acclimated. After consulting the back issues of Tropical Fish Hobbyist magazine archived in his bathroom, he would call our new houseguests by their Latin names: Carnegiella strigata, Pterophyllum altum, Danio margaritatus.

The fish tank was made entirely of glass and set on a steel frame. It held seventy-five gallons of tap water filtered through an external canister, and was loaded with one hundred pounds of fine gravel—micro-pebbles in shades of slate dotted with blue and pink. Within these walls my dad created an ecosystem unlike any found on earth. For flora he installed java fern, Amazon swords, and Madagascar lace plants—long, leafy green plants from three continents that lent the appearance of an underwater vegetable garden—as well as duckweed, which floated on the surface, just kissing the air. He sourced the fish from blackwater environments, which are tributaries of large river systems like the Irrawaddy or the Mekong. The tank held Congo tetras, emerald-eye Rasboras, silver angelfish, double-red cockatoo dwarf cichlids, blue rams, spotted Badis, and celestial pearl danios, among others, each species occupying its own place within the tank. The kuhli loaches, thin and striped like living tire marks, would zigzag along the bottom; the male guppies flaunted silk-scarf tails as they traveled across the middle; the chocolate gourami—timid mouthbrooders—would hide in the vegetation near the top.

In the new living room where my brother and I spent every other weekend, the only...