When my college-student son informed me that his mother (we’re
divorced five years now) had bought him a baby iguana, I wrote it off as
a young man’s fancy fueled by his mother’s new-age, middle-age
reshaping of her life mode.She
had herself recently purchased an iguana for her home, and everything
new that she did she enthusiastically promoted to others as the answer
to the riddle of a happy and fulfilling existence.(Not a bad trait, necessarily, but not part of my personality.)Besides, I was a dog man from way back—a dogged dog man, you
might say—and the notion of a lizard as a pet left me, excuse the easy
reptilian metaphor, cold.
When I visited David one winter evening at the house he shared
with several other stalwart young gentlemen, idealistic but sensible and
passing to a new stage of life all, he showed me “
Kingston
,” as he had named his lizard, for the capital of Jamaica, where iguanas ran free.(Or
stared free, as the case may be.They
spend a lot of time crouched in one position, staring into space.They don’t really run much.)As David took Kingston from his cage, my first surprise
impression was that of a cute little green guy with a sweet, sensitive
face and a kind of cool intelligence that seemed to suggest a secret,
that he was holding something back.I could tell my son was proud of him.
“Want to hold him?” David asked.I felt a strong, sudden stab of worry.
“I don’t know,” I said.“What will he do?”
“Just relax and he’ll be all right,” David said.“He’ll just sort of sit on your hand.”
“OK,” I said, not believing entirely, but wanting to please
my son.I stuck my hand out
flat, fingers together, thumb in.I
was anything but relaxed.
That next summer, David’s house lease expired and his friends
dispersed and he moved back in with me on a temporary basis.Kingston, with his clear plexi-glass cage, moved with him, installed in a small
living room off the entrance hallway to my house.
Left alone frequently, Kingston
and I began to become acquainted on a one-to-one basis.It fell on old dad to feed and water him and to keep his cage
filled with clean white straw.One
day I put his overhead light on an automatic timer that David said gave
a healthy regularity to Kingston’s nights and days.I
chopped up tiny platefuls of yellow squash and green beans and other
vegetables (variety in diet is good for lizards) and placed them
carefully in a bowl on the floor of his cage.In short, I found myself taking a regular shine to little Kingston, sweet, noble little
Kingston, gentle, poetic Kingston.
“What would happen if Kingston
got out of his cage?” I asked David one day.
“We’d never see him again,” David said.I waited until David left the house to check the seams on Kingston’s cage.Sure enough, one
joint needed to be taped.
I didn’t hold Kingston
much (I feared he would squirm away), but I watched him
often—constantly, in fact.He
was shy but very calm, almost yogi-like in his self-possession.If I entered the room while he was poised over his food plate, he
stopped still, with his mouth open, refusing to move until I left.He didn’t want anybody to see him eat.He probably didn’t want anybody to know his religious
preferences, either.He
liked to keep some things secret.
As a 21-year-old young man living at home with his father, David
was 99% agreeable and charming, but there were occasional,
understandable spells of non-communication or discontent.He wanted to be out pursuing his dreams. He wanted to carve out
his own niche.But it was a
sure-fire positive whenever I mentioned old Kingston.Kingston
drew us together in a common bond of lizard admiration.But it was more than that, really.It was a sharing of beliefs, a similar outlook, an
intergenerational crossing.Like
our mutual enjoyment of organized sports, it was an oblique but
effective way for us to communicate as two mature gentlemen living in
this world that contained both paradise and thorns.
“Look where Kingston
is today!” I said, pointing to the cage where
Kingston
might be crouched with one delicate webbed foot splayed out over a leaf.“Kingston
climbed up his branch.”“Kingston
is suspended from the roof.”When
David came home with a new floor heater for the cage, we were both
excited as Kingston seemed pleased, standing on the heater for hours,
motionless, content, soaking in the invisible rays.
We joked that Kingston
was an intellectual, a sage, a guru, withdrawn into himself while
mulling over difficult questions of metaphysics and cybergenics.We said that Kingston
was a fan of reggae music and late night comedy shows, some on the
raunchy side.
Life went on.The
Christmas season was hectic and fast-paced.My daughter Kate returned home for a month-long stay from a
college on the East Coast, filling the household with her cheerful and
chatty personality and a steady stream of polite and congenial friends,
girls and boys both.There
was music in the air.As all
this activity swirled around me, I felt comforted, contented, joyful
almost, coming to grips at last with all the recent changes in my life,
able now to look, at least tentatively, to the future.A future.My future.
One night, just after New Year’s, I stopped short as I walked
through
Kingston’s room, something catching my eye.I rushed over to the cage, lifted the lid, thrust my hand inside.
Kingston
was motionless as always, but there was something about the quality of
his motionlessness that concerned me.I touched him with a sense of foreboding.His body was stiff and withered and lifeless.His eyes reflected nothingness.He was gone from this earthly realm, no more cognizant than the
straw that lined his cage.He
was dead.
A huge sense of loss floated up from my body as I stood by
Kingston’s cage, wishing, praying that this terrible thing wasn’t true.“This is awful,” I blustered.“This is awful.”I
paced for hours in a restless, feverish state, waiting for David to
return home so I could tell him the news.My voice was barely under control as I led him to the cage where Kingston
lay still.I couldn’t move
him yet.I had to wait for
David to see him first.
“I don’t know what could have happened,” I lamented.“I don’t know what I could have done different.”David looked at me as if to provide guidance and counsel.He shook his head.
“Kingston
was really small to begin with, Dad,” David said.“He probably had some kind of congenital problem.”We shared a moment of sadness and grieving as two strong men and
then began the attempt to move forward, as the living must do.
The next morning, at David’s suggestion, I buried Kingston’s little body in our back yard beside our Chihuahua Chelsea in what I
might now call a family pet burial plot.It was a peaceful place, at the top of a gentle slope angling
down to a patio at the edge of the house.Standing there, shovel resting on the ground, I realized that
Kingston represented many important things to me—David choosing to
move back home, albeit temporarily, and that I could provide a safe,
secure place for him; my loving him through this pet he had first loved;
even the fact that his mother had bought Kingston for him held
significance for me, reminding me of our long lost love, those early,
dizzy days of romance, the difficult but rewarding years of
child-raising, the plans and career moves and next steps.The moments that David and I shared discussing Kingston, the humor, the good-natured intellectual hypothesizing were priceless
to me, a healing balm on my soul, a way for me to know that I could
relate to someone that I loved.
A few weeks later David moved out again, as someone his age
should want to do, but just before he left his mother and he bought a
new iguana to keep at my house until, supposedly, David could afford a
deposit to keep it with him.They
were really just doing it for me.
