the boring things
Shea and I went to see UP last weekend (it is an excellent movie and you should see it if you haven’t already). I won’t say too much more about that, because I don’t want to spoil anything about the film. But I was thinking about how sometimes there are these little things that you miss about someone; little things that probably don’t mean a whole lot to anyone but you.
When I was a kid, my grandparents would pick my sister and I up from school, and we would wait at their house until my mom came home from work. I spent a lot of those afternoons out in the backyard. One day, I found a little green lizard like the one in the photo, only this one was a tiny baby–not more than two inches from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail. It was so cute! I got the idea that I wanted to show it to my mom when she came to pick us up. But it was still pretty early, and I knew if I set the lizard down, he would, of course, run away. So I sat down on the back steps, cupping the little guy in my hands and occasionally peeking through my fingers.
After a while, my grandmother came out into the yard. She asked what I was doing, and I told her, reluctantly–I knew that what I was doing was kind of a “kid” thing, and I was pretty sure she was going to tell me that my mom didn’t really need to see the baby lizard, and that it was too long to wait, and that I should just let him go. Instead, she got a thoughtful look on her face, and after a while she had me (and the lizard) come into the kitchen with her. She found a peanut butter jar with just a little bit of peanut butter left in it, washed it and dried it out, and used an ice pick to poke small air holes in the metal lid. She said, “We can keep him in here until your mom gets home.” I put the lizard in the jar and she closed the lid.
The funny thing is, I don’t even remember showing the little guy to my mom. But I remember the jar so vividly.