Lizard

Nighttime at CRISP

I love the way Nasim speaks. How she says, “A little bit of lizard inside the house. A little bit of cockroach.” 

I like the way night comes and the only light is inside and those iridescent lizards stand watch on the window screen. It takes a lot to scare them away. It takes a lot to get a wasp back out the open window. This is where my skills from childhood have come in handy.

When I was a boy I caught wasps in the field beside the house where we lived. I caught big black and yellow bees by sneaking up behind purple clover with a jar and a lid. I have caught four or five wasps in the room I gave Nasim. Could be the same wasp over and over again, playing a game, enjoying the ride, telling all the other wasps that he met the man who planted the fig trees where they were born.

What if somewhere in the generations of these wasps there is a sort of Union Hall like the Knights of Columbus or the Lions Club? And what it in this hall, along the wall, frames hang, and inside these frames there exist names of people who are safe, of people who believe in the necessity of the wasp species?

Those that hang in the outside corner of my front door want only a space to keep their babies safe. And perhaps they have heard that this is one spot.

I’d like to go back to a little bit of lizard. Inside the house or out. Something I never had as a boy in the cold of Iowa and something that never ceases to connect me. Sometimes I see leaves move. This morning they were the leaves of the cardinal flower, a plant loved by hummingbirds, and with this flick of the vine a bright green lizard waist high. On this occasion, this lizard did not poke out his throat in an attempt to call out to a mate. At least I think that’s what the poking means. Could be an attempt at intimidation, or even his way of saying, “I’m hungry.”

I wonder have you seen the nighttime lizards and the way they sit stationary, all four legs stretched, the pads of their feet little dots of toes and then, suddenly, a dart for a bug. Into the mouth and chewed. Much the same way a dragonfly eats her prey alive, one bite ate a time until the entire body disappears.

I wonder how many of us got eaten by dinosaurs. I wonder how many of us know that is why we are afraid today. I wonder how many of us know that is why we fight. Even why we isolate. For those who could not do one of these three things got chomped up by a T Rex while quickly trying to get a bite of some marrow left in the leg bone of a bird the size of a Volkswagen.

We once were the bug eaten by the lizard. And so the next time that I want to beat up on myself, i must consider that i rose out from the middle of the food chain. I must consider that I was once a fly in the middle of the night, on the wrong side of the screen, reaching for the light.

Mere metaphor comes only when I try to seek, only when I look into the how and why of my own thinking. There are moments, in the light of day, when I become the fly in mid air, when I swim through the pool, when I use all of my muscles, when i know that there will be a morning if only I get the right kind of sleep.

Did I tell you the way Nasim sits, with her feet flat on the chair and knees bent or how I had the thought the other day that God sent her as a gift, as a way to keep me alive longer for all of the things that I have done, good and bad, and for my ability to turn the bad into good. And if this is indeed her destiny, she will have to live with a little bit of lizard and a whole lot of love. 

And this…this is human nature.