Lizard: Mouth to Mouth

I don’t like leaving pool toys in the water when we aren’t swimming because if my kids snake into the gated pool, it seems like they might be more tempted to go into the water without me around. Hi, I’m paranoid. Not a day goes by owning my pool where I don’t imagine one of my kids dead at the bottom of the pool. I can’t talk my wife into filling the pool with cement and my imagination won’t let me be, so there you go.

But yesterday I saw a lizard at the bottom of the pool. I scooped him out with a net and he looked freshly drowned. Rigor Mortis hadn’t settled in yet so I tried tipping the blue belly upside down and drain the water from his lungs. By now, my three-year-old Olivia walked up to see what I was doing. She wanted to touch the lizard not knowing he was dead.

I told Olivia that the lizard went into the pool without his floaties so he went to the bottom and died. She asked if he went to Jesus. I asked her to pray that Jesus would bring him back to us. She started praying, though I didn’t hear anything about lizards or drowning. I think she was praying about pizza. Adults aren’t the only ones who have a problem staying on topic in their prayer life.

Now that she was praying I figured it would be a great Disney moment if the lizard came back from the dead…though, Disney doesn’t really allow prayer in any of their material since they don’t want to offend the 4% of the world that doesn’t pray. Anyways, I thought I might help Jesus out since it didn’t look like he was doing such a great job at ressurrecting this lizard.

His pink tongue was hanging out as I pried his mouth open and blew a few puffs into his lungs. I could feel his ribs open up in my fingers and I started tapping his chest hoping to get the heart working. I also cupped my hands around him to heat him up.

I can’t imagine the lizard was down there for long and I’ve found lizards in hybernation during mid-winter when they took a breath maybe every ten minutes. I figured there was a good chance for resuscitation if I could shake him up until my daughter’s prayers kicked in.

After about ten minutes I just started feeling funny. Like I was frenching a dead lizard…which seemed infinitely more pleasurable than drinking the diet chocolate-cherry Dr. Pepper I had for lunch. Olivia had stopped praying after about thirty seconds and was in another part of the house playing with her toys.

I shrugged and threw the dead lizard in the bushes.

You are Meaningful

I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this before, but you are meaningful. There’s a lot of lies floating around about you being an accident, or you being insignificant but I’m here to set the record straight. Oh, and I’m going to back it up with cold hard facts.

Looking at your biology there never has been and never will be anyone just like you. Even if we cloned your DNA and made a fetal duplicate, the cells would quickly differentiate due to physical laws and you would be a different person in most every aspect from even your twin. Your imperfections are part of your meaning so though you hate your nose, only you have your nose. You could have been anybody, and at the very least you have the brain capacity to read this and understand what I’m writing and that is nothing short of a miracle. Most others in the vast history of man didn’t get as far as you just did so good job.

You were also made by a good God who knew you before anybody else laid eyes on you. You are not your body, you are not your brain, you have a body and you have a brain. There is a soul rolling around in you somewhere and it is made of stuff that isn’t entirely captured by the particles of the body. If you feel guilt for anything you’ve ever done it proves that your soul is still operational and it’s a great gift.

Like your body, nobody else will have your soul. Billions of souls have been made and will likely be made in the days to come and none will be you. The singularity of your experience is only lived by you. God himself can know you, but he cannot know what it means to BE you. Your suffering is unique. Your victories are unique. Your struggles and breakthroughs are unique to you.

I hope you’re not reading a bunch of self-image therapy-speak into my claiming that you are meaningful. I didn’t say that you were good, noble, victorious or admirable. You may be the best person ever or you may be the most colossal narcissist ever to walk the planet. I’m not making a judgment about you, I’m only stating the facts that your existence is huge, robust with potential, miraculous in originality and made in the image of God. That’s all.

He made you in His image. That’s all.

PET LIZARD!

It’s one of those moments all fathers relish, a right of passage if you will. The passing on of a skill from one generation to the other. A tear is shed. Today I took my son lizard fishing.

That’s right, in my house we fish for lizards. Some 800 years ago, when I was just a lad, we didn’t have video games of lizards. We caught real ones. I caught hundreds of “blue bellies” also known as the Fence Swift, the most common lizard in these parts…perhaps in the world. They have blue and black streaks across their white bellies and do push ups in the sun.

Anyways, my son Ed (who didn’t know that Blue Bellies were about as common as houseflies) found a lizard basking in the sun and called me outside. I ran upstairs, grabbed a spool of thread and made a slip-knot (slip-knots are a lesson for another time) then let out about four feet of thread.

Lizards are dumb. They don’t generally run away unless you get within a four foot range. Probably poor eye-site or just hoping their brown camouflage throws you by sitting still. They’ll sit there as you work the loop over their head from far above. Once the slip-knot is around the neck, they can run off all they want because you’ve got em’.

Ed (age 4) screamed and cheered as I (age 41) hopped up and down with my catch. He had a tail about half the size of a normal Fence Swift so he must have lost it some time last summer. Their tails come off pretty easily at the base and nerves in the tail wiggle so a predator will work on the tail while the lizard runs away. Genius! I mean, Random Mutation!

We got one of my aquariums out of the garage and put a layer of sand down, added a rock, up-ended a water-bottle lid to act as a trough and found some crickets in the garage for food. Now we wait…because this is the fattest blue belly I’ve ever seen and I have a feeling she’s pregnant.