Comes a Season

Today I had the solemn duty of burying a pet. A very small one, I admit, but the one who'd been with me the longest.
About twelve years ago I attempted to fix my childhood and fill in a gap by getting a lizard. Not too far from here there was a reptile store that had moved in right next to where I'd worked in a Mexican restaurant in high school. A dance studio also moved in, but I wasn't as interested in that.

The reptile store was a very cool place to hang out. It was, as could be expected, filled with glass cages holding all kinds of cold blooded, dinosaur-looking beasts and a good number of snakes. I'm not sure why I selected the one I did, a cuban anole, but it may have been a combination of things. One, it may have been less expensive than some of the more exotic offerings, or it may have been its bright green color and size.

I ended up building an enclosure for him and spent a great deal of time at the lizard store, as I called it, buying crickets and pinkies. The owner of the store, a young guy, was very cool and one of the snakes on display was his personal pet. Annie wasn't for sale, but she was (one of?) the anacondas they used in the movie of the same name.

Yeah, she was HUGE.

My anole, Andy or Little Green Guy, was the least active reptile on the planet. I think he was lucky to have been captured, since I doubt he could have lived more than a week in the wild. He wouldn't hunt, wouldn't even seek out, anything to eat or drink but was literally content to wait for things to drop into his mouth. Oh, he might move his head to grab something tasty next to him, but that was about it.

His only other trick was to bite me every time I grabbed him. He'd sometimes fall from one of the branches in his habitat to the bottom and, being too lazy to climb back up, would lay there until the big pink hand would come in to rescue him. Then, he'd bite it.

With my success with raising him, I next bought a basilisk for $100. Yes, I had a notion that some day I might see if he could really run on water, but he escaped  before I could try him out on a pond or pool. What happened, actually, is I was picking him up and he got loose and ran out of the house at an ungodly speed.  I gave up looking for him after about a minute, and bought a replacement who managed to live a few years without ever being introduced to a body of water.

Then, it was just little green guy. Since he never moved, he was indistinguishable from green art, which is how I usually referred to him. In his later years he could no longer handle pinkies, then couldn't even deal with crickets, and ended up on a diet of worms and hamburger or other bits of meat.

Twelve is, I think, a lot of years for an anole to live. I also have to say that my home is quite a bit emptier than you'd think a lost lizard could be responsible for.