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My Friend, the Lizard
By Brian Cremins
Louisiana State University
bcremins@aol.com
Posted: August, 2004 Student Affairs Online, vol. 5 no. 3 - Summer 2004
Regular readers of this column will notice a few changes in this installment, most significant of which is my new address. In my last column, I discussed my troubles locating a free e-mail terminal at the Modern Language Association Convention in San Diego last December. Careful readers will recall that I was in San Diego interviewing for tenure-track jobs in English beginning in Fall of 2004. I managed to secure one of those positions and now write to you from my new home in Louisiana. Though everything about my life has changed beyond recognition in the last few months, there are a few constants, one of which is a dependence on e-mail which has become even more profound now that I find myself in alien territory. There is nothing more alien, perhaps, than a life-long New Englander living in the South for the first time. When a waitress at the local rib joint asked me if I wanted my pulled pork sandwich "dressed," I gave her a perplexed look and told her I had no idea what she was talking about. In the movies, don't waitresses always ask if you want "fixin's"? When I admitted that I'm an English professor, she laughed even harder. So as I adjust to the thick, heavy heat, and the bugs, and the small green lizards with bright underbellies, I find myself checking my e-mail more frequently, and waiting for the latest news from up North or out West, from old friends who have no idea where I am and are surprised when they hear that I have moved. I am living in two worlds: the new territory which surrounds me, the swamps and the oak trees and the Mississippi River, and the more familiar though no less strange terrain of cyberspace. E-mails from old friends are often more valuable than phone calls, because they last longer, and, like a good book, you can always return to them later.
This retreat into cyberspace has given me the chance to catch up with old friends. Before leaving the East Coast for Louisiana, I forgot to mail that most significant of electronic letters: the mass e-mail with my new address and phone number. After cramming all of my comic books, files, and miscellaneous junk into boxes for the movers (the resilience of old bills is amazing-I may not be able to find this month's phone bill, but I have managed to save electric bills from 1996), I had a suspicion I had forgotten to do something. Let's see-sedative for the cat, food for the car trip, hotel reservations, first month's rent in the new house. Everything's covered. Even fresh t-shirts for the Louisiana heat and a beat-up Stephen King novel to read on the road. When we at last arrived in the "Sportman's Paradise," and I noticed that my inbox was filled with fresh mail asking where I'd disappeared to, I realized my mistake-and then used it to my advantage.
Rather than sending postcards to all of my friends, I began writing long e-mails in which I described, first, the lizards and their pink throats. I decided to keep a running journal of this flood of new experiences. And with e-mail, those new experiences could be translated immediately from the real world to the electronic one, without the delays of the postal service or the ambiguity (and ease) of the phone. Besides, since I had forgotten to send everyone my new address before making my way to Louisiana, I thought I could make it up to people by sending electronic postcards filled with sights and sounds which I found amusing, or surprising, or terrifying, or puzzling. So I began with the blonde squirrel, and made my way through the rain, and the lightning, and the insects big as Volkswagons, and especially the food. I'll share a few of these with you, and I would ask my Southern readers to be patient with me, since I will no doubt sound like some alien dropped to earth from one of Ray Bradbury's Martian tales while struggling to describe the scenery.
I was not sure what to make of the blonde squirrel. It is not the squirrel which interests me, but his/her blondeness. Even the other squirrels appeared fascinated, and just a little intimidated, but their playmate. When I was a ten-year old I often threw peanuts to squirrels who waited expectantly on my front porch. So squirrels I know, but not blonde ones. I would have expected to see blonde squirrels in Hollywood, but I have asked a friend about this phenomenon, and in his four years in Los Angeles, he's not seen any. (He might not be making the effort, but now he knows to look). A genetic mutation? Exposure to the sun? A bleaching effect produced by the smog which cloaks across the Gulf of Mexico from Houston and other points further South? I don't have an answer, but I have to say it was prettier than the rust-colored nut eaters I had grown accustomed to in New England.
My research into the squirrel was cut short by the rain-or should I say, the Rain. With the exception of the dry spell we are now experiencing, I can almost set my watch by the dark storm clouds, lighting, and thunder which gather at 3 every afternoon. I know how to drive in snow, but not in the Rain. And unlike New England, whose rolling hills make it difficult to see what is coming around the next corner, this stretch of Louisiana is almost as flat as a prairie, which means you can see the rain up ahead even while you are perfectly dry. You can see thick sheets of it waiting for you just down the highway. The only advice I've gotten on how to drive through flooded streets is to "keep going!" so that no water crawls up the exhaust pipe. I have with some confidence, however, donated all of my ice scrapers and snow shovels to a friend in Connecticut who will no doubt need them far more than I will, unless we experience the outbreak of an unexpected ice age in the next couple of years (which, given the havoc we humans like to play with the environment, is probably not out of the question).
I have already mentioned the pink-throated lizards, probably because they are my favorite subjects for electronic postcards. When I first spotted one, crawling across a fence and into a thicket of ferns, I thought I'd dropped into an episode of the old Saturday morning TV show Land of the Lost. He looked like a miniature dinosaur, though given his size, this descendant of T. Rex had fallen on rough times. You know you've tumbled down the evolutionary scale when an orange tabby cat can terrorize you with one swat of his paw. The first lizard I encountered in my backyard stared at me as if to say, "Keep smiling and I don't eat the bugs. And there's a lot of bugs out here." He puffed up his pink throat in defiance and slinked away. I haven't bothered him since, and we've made a mutual agreement. I don't make any cracks about his size restrictions and he keeps snacking on the bugs which threaten our garden. I think we have developed a good relationship, but he has a brother lizard who's been trying to get into the living room. We'll need to talk.
These are just a few of the images I've been sending to friends and family as my wife and I and our cat settle into our new home. The immediacy of the experience is best captured in these short, quick e-mails. Though living with the heat and the rain and the lizards (and the fantastic food, which I do not have space to discuss here but will save for next time) should be real enough, keeping an electronic record which can be sent within seconds all over the world somehow makes the real seem even more real. This may have something to do with the fact that the electronic geography of cyberspace is portable and instantly accessible. The dataports so common now in even the cheapest hotels give testimony to the traveler's urgent desire to plug into a familiar space. By writing a new territory into a more familiar one, the two begin to merge, and the alien space ceases to look quite so distant or unnerving. And what better material for new e-mail conversations than blonde squirrels, Biblical rain, and scaly green neighbors?
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