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Dear Serina,
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2 Septembre, 1997
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Today is Tuesday. The sky was very blue and there were lovely big white
fluffy and puffy clouds like cauliflower or cotton-ball thunder clouds
in the sky. There was no smog — only blue sky and brilliant white clouds.
A beautiful world. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen anything
that white. Bright and pure, yet puffy — possibly bringing cleansing rain.
Yesterday, there was a lizard in the kitchen. He was orange on top and
dark grey on the sides. He was not scared of me. Because of his bright
color and unfamiliar appearance, I ushered him into a shoebox where he
calmly rested. He was very serene, not jittery skittish like all other
lizards I’ve seen. But he did not walk or crawl into the shoebox—he slithered
like a snake, using his feet perhaps only as oars to scoot along. Because
of this, I realized he was not a lizard. I then though he might be a salamander
until I remembered that salamanders don’t have scales which my new friend
did have. He was only 4″ long and very thin (he looked perfectly like a
stick when lying on the floor), yet his head looked like a dinosaur, not
like a lizard. It had those round tympanums and was a bit alligatorish.
I then noticed he had longitudinal gills that ran down between his fore
and aft legs. I then knew that I had absolutely no idea whatsoever even
what species family he was. Was he an amphibian? Was he a snake? He was
both and neither. I thought I might hold on to him until Christopher could
see him since Christopher knows a lot about different types of reptiles
and other slidey-crawly things. Mom started saying that she wanted him
out of the house so I put him in the garden.
I then remembered that they were doing a lot of pounding and crushing
in the roadwork out behind the house and it reminded me of how live frogs
and some other species are occasionally found inside frog-shaped crevices
in rocks that are smashed apart during excavations. The frogs had buried
themselves in mud flats thousands of years ago and have been in hibernation
waiting for water so long that their little mud flats turn to stone which
keeps them perfectly insulated and water tight—free from evaporation or
bacteria or anything else.
Perhaps my friend was a singular example of a long extinct ancestor
of lizards or snakes or crocodiles. Or maybe he was just a strange slithering
gilled lizard I’d never happened to see before. If he was a new species,
then it was the third time in my life that I have discovered a species—in
the Philippines I discovered a tubular jelly worm that swam like a slinky
and dissolved into nothingness when picked up. In the middle of the Pacific,
in waters five miles deep, I once swam and saw a trilobite. Transparent
like a jellyfish and almost two feet long. Also thought extinct for 50
million years, like the coelecanth once was.
I went out to see him again to see if I could photograph him, but he
was gone. Regardless of where he came from and whether there are any others
like him, he was still unique. It was a rare privilege to encounter such
an elegant and serene creature.
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