Terry Cowgill

Lizard Or The Wizard?

October 29, 2007 on 7:53 pm | In Oddball |

Even as I rejoice at the fact that the Bosox are once again atop the baseball world, I have a confession to make. There’s a reptile on the loose in my house. No, not the cable guy who never left, but a real critter with scales. And I know how he got there.

Over Columbus Day weekend, my wife and two kids went up to the Adirondacks to visit her father. We reluctantly decided to get my daughter a pet. She had pretty bad asthma as a toddler and we’re reasonably sure it will resurface with exposure to animal dander. Furry creatures, therefore, were out of the question.

So they settled on a gecko, a small lizard that makes a good pet and can be contained in a modest-sized glass cage with a heat lamp. No problem. That is, until we got home. When Roger took out the little perforated box we thought contained the lizard, he dumped it gently into the cage. Alas, nothing came out but air.

We looked in the car and found nothing except candy wrappers and Lego pieces. We called my father-in-law, lest he come upon the reptile during a nocturnal visit to the bathroom. He reported no unusual sightings in the house. A real mystery.

As you might expect, Ellen was in tears over the loss of her dear slithering friend and my wife and I took pity on her. So we went to Petpourri to get another, but owner Stephanie Pellegrino said she did not carry lizards. She referred us to the Canaan Valley Pet Store. The fine people there set Ellen up with a shiny new lizard which she promptly named Spots.

But one day a couple of weeks ago my wife came home with the kids to find “Flower,” as the kids had named the little guy after the late meerkat on Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet. He was slithering around the kitchen floor looking for food. Evidently he had been successful in doing so since his inauspicious arrival in our home, because he had grown at least an inch or two. When he saw the approaching children, Flower scurried under the baseboard heater, out of sight, reach and (therefore) out of mind.

Then on Friday night during game three of the Red Sox-Rockies World Series, I heard a commotion in the computer room, where my kids were playing. They had spotted Flower and trapped him under a paper bowl. But when they lifted it up (even a little) he managed to slither away to another baseboard heater unit, even as we unsuccessfully attempted to grab him by the tail.

I have three questions for readers who know much more about these matters than I. How do you trap a 6-inch lizard? Once caught, can Flower co-exist in the same cage as Spots? Can he survive the winter in my cold house?

The sex of the two repitles has yet to be determined with any degree of certainty, but what do you do with a litter of gecko pups? Put them up for adoption? This is turning out to be way more than I bargained for …