Iguana 101

 

I often debate with myself the merits of children keeping pets (mostly I lose the debate). My daughters’ grandmother, who is supremely wise (after having raised five kids of her own, my wife Karen among them), has a simple rule about pets.  It goes something like this:  No Pets. 

            Since grandma is the landlord of our domestic domain, my own three daughters have learned to respect her rules.  They don’t keep pets.  The animals that inhabit their room, swim in fish tanks, burrow in terrariums, crawl across the floor, are not pets.  They are family.  In our household, the animals have as much standing as the humans, maybe more; certainly they have more standing than the only male.

Maybe “No Pets” is a good rule.  Or “No New Family Members.”  I have a feeling, however, that my girls would argue for my dismissal before they would give up their slimy, warty, scaly, and furry “family.”

Caring for animals will teach us responsibility, I can hear them say.  So why am I assigned the litter box and the lizard cage?  Why do I get to clean up the vomit and gut piles on the living room carpet?  Why is it that if something smells the girls always look in my direction?

Our animals can teach us empathy, they continue.  Now they’re reaching.  What I’ve learned from keeping animals is just the opposite.  Animals point out just how irresponsible we can be, and just how greatly we can come to despise them. 

***

            I offer this story as a warning.  If ever you take your children to a pet store—a foolish misjudgment to begin with—keep them away from the cute baby green lizards with the golden eyes imploring you to take them home with you.  Yes, these lizards, green iguanas, cold-blooded reptiles, have that much personality, even more than the puppies, the kittens, and the screaming canaries.  What these baby green monsters won’t tell you until it’s too late is how demanding in their care they are, and how demanding in their size they will become.

            We carried “Pern” home in a small, hole-punched cardboard box pet stores use for packaging their mice and birds.  The girls decided on the name because they had recently become enamored with a series of books by Ann McCaffrey that depicted a planet inhabited by dragons, and people who had become marooned there from a lost Earth ship.  The author called the world “Pern,” which as I remember was an acronym for something.  So, my daughters named our tiny green iguana for a mythical dragon-world populated by a few people who had learned to build a society around the beasts.  The girls should have christened our household with the name instead.

I bought the iguana and its cute little leash.  Karen, always more brilliant than I, returned to the pet store and bought the book on iguanas.  Then she read it.  When she finished, she said, “Just another small thing you’ve given me that grows up!”  Karen never minced words.  “And this one is worse than a baby.  At least babies wear diapers.” 

Green iguanas, we learned very quickly, have special needs.  Because they come from rain forest climates in Central and South America, the lizards pale to our rock-tough desert lizards.  Iguanas require a cooler, more humid environment than our hot, desiccating desert offers.  They want to be indoors.  They like to be misted. 

And this is just the beginning.  Because they now live indoors and out of the heat, you must provide a heat rock for them.  This enables your new iguana to properly digest all the fresh bananas and mangoes, spinach leaves and squash blossoms you feed her on a daily basis, when you’re not misting her majesty as she basks under her sun lamp.  Did I mention the full-spectrum light?  Also because your iguana is living indoors and away from harsh sunlight, you must supply a source of ultraviolet light in the form of a special (and expensive) lamp.  UV keeps iguanas healthy and tanned.  Your iguana needs to look good for all the socialization she requires.  Yes, socialization—like getting out of her cage so she can meet people and scamper unexpectedly up their bodies.  Iguanas enjoy high places because they normally live in trees rather than on the ground like any self-respecting desert lizard.  When a tree isn’t handy, a person’s head will do.

You don’t want to know what happens if your iguana isn’t properly socialized.  She can get a bit testy.  Like a desperate housewife (or househusband, as the case may be) she gets an attitude.  “You never take me anywhere,” her eyes accuse, every time you walk past her cage.  Eventually, those penetrating eyes and the mounting guilt break you down and you let her out.  But by now she’s antisocial, and she takes out her frustrations on you, the closest family member within reach of her toothy mouth, her needle-sharp claws, and her ultimate payback weapon, a long, bony-stiff tail that raises welts where she whips it across your legs.  And dragons only breathe fire!

***

Pern adjusted well to our home.  The girls created a place for her in a ten-gallon aquarium tank with a basking rock and tree branches and a large bowl of water she could bathe in.  They took her for walks on her leash or rode around on their bikes with her gripping tightly to a shoulder.  I still have photographs from this time when she was small: Pern with her oversized leash on the porch fence.  Pern perched on my smiling daughter Kasondra’s head.  Pern with RainCloud and Mittens. 

She didn’t tolerate the kittens when she was small.  She’d puff up and her dewlap would flare and her skin grew darker when they came around, so the girls kept them separated.  But Pern soon learned how to escape her cage.  One day my wife and daughters came home and found her under the couch, unmoving and nearly black from playing with the kittens.  Apparently, Pern didn’t want to play but the kittens insisted.  She had a few chew marks on her but nothing serious.

Over the next year, the kittens grew into cats and Pern grew into a cat hater.  Encounters between them changed from kittens-chasing-lizard to lizard-attacking-cats.  Her tail was lethal.  I swear she could nail a fly on the wall with that thing.  The cats avoided her, but if by mistake they came within lashing distance, she’d remove a patch of fur from their butts as they raced to recover the error. There was no messing with her now.  Pern would no longer fit inside a cardboard pet carrier.  She no longer fit her leash.  In fact, she had outgrown the ten-gallon tank, its thirty-gallon replacement, and had begun to look uncomfortable in the fifty.  I know she had designs on the living room, the largest room in our house, and I also know she insisted on some changes first.

Karen found the birdcage, a six-foot high, four-foot wide and deep, wrought-iron monstrosity that she felt Pern must have to be comfortable living with us.  I believe a giant parrot or condor had been the cage’s former occupant.  Three hundred dollars later, with some added shelves, hot rocks, and lights, and Pern became furniture in our living room.  The only furniture.  Since the room wasn’t large enough for a couch and Pern, the couch had to go.  We had no place to sit in our living room, but we did have something interesting just above eye level to look at while you were standing there.  Something that always looked back and down on you, usually with smug disdain.    

Now, Pern became the center of attention.  From her high perch, she examined the comings and goings of Karen and the girls, the relatives and the neighbors when they visited.  She watched television with us.  She played games with us.  And, when we pulled out our dining table and set chairs around it, she ate meals with us.

Jessica, who usually arrived last to the table, would complain, “Why do I always get the sneeze seat!” Her sisters normally left her the chair closest to the cage.  Iguanas have a particular way of removing excess salt from their bodies; special structures in their nasal cavities collect the salt, which the animal then combines with liquid and forcefully ejects.  The behavior doubles as an annoyance mechanism, intended to alarm those who come to close or, in Jessica’s case, thoroughly disgust them. 

It worked like this:  Jessica would sit at the table in her assigned chair.  Pern would maneuver on her shelf to line up Jessica in her sights.  Just as my daughter began forking food into her mouth or drinking from a glass, Pern would execute a short nasal burst, freezing Jessica in mid gulp. 

“Pern!”  Jessica would shout.  “That’s so gross!”  To which Pern would respond with a satisfied grin.  Everyone knew that Jessica disliked Pern—she was big and green and smelled.  Apparently, the feelings were mutual.  

Pern especially loved breakfast with eggs on the menu. She preferred hers scrambled but she never turned away cheese omelets or wooden shoes, a favorite, puffy, egg-batter concoction passed down to us from Karen’s Dutch side of the family.  Pern would become so excited with the smell of eggs that she couldn’t wait for leftovers but would climb down from her perch and demand the door of her cage be opened.  She was too large to eat directly off the table, but she didn’t mind taking a meal from the cat dish, often helping herself to the dry cat food.  We came to believe that Pern thought she was a cat as she also learned to use the cat door when she felt the need for an afternoon siesta in the sun.   

“Pern’s going out the cat door again,” one of the girls would say.  We’d watch as she swiveled her hips up the driveway.  Then my wife would call after her: “Pern, where do you think you’re going? Bad girl.”  And without fail, she’d stop, flatten her belly against the cement, and turn to look at us as if to say, “Who, me?  Don’t mind me.  I’m just getting in a little basking time.”

Of course if we didn’t notice her, she kept on.  I was never sure where that lizard brain thought it was going.  One time I found her high in a tree in the next yard, probably daydreaming about tropical forest canopies spreading above tea-stained backwater pools.  She left tell-tale drag marks on the ground, which I could easily follow.  Another time she had climbed atop a neighbor’s wall that held a large dog on the opposite side.  The dog went nuts, and Pern, unable to move, turned from olive green to biohazard orange.  She stayed that way for hours after I tracked her down and carried her home.

After Pern reached four and a half feet in length, I finally built her an outdoor, climate-controlled enclosure that filled the western end of our porch.  I knew she would be upset about being relegated to place beyond the main flow of traffic, so I paid particular attention to amenities I believed she’d appreciate.  To begin with, the enclosure tripled her living space and included a rock waterfall that spilled into a dark pool. Heavy tree branches rose from the pool and spread to a high sheltered alcove with a hot rock and full-spectrum lamp.  I planted ferns and a fig tree in one corner and hung the redwood lattice with flowering bromeliads.  Overhead, I secured misters, which kept the entire environment hissing with moisture.  The only thing missing was a recording of howler monkeys. 

I introduced Pern to her new home by placing her on the floor of the porch just outside of the enclosure’s open door.  She stared at the burbling fountain and dripping foliage for a moment, then turned and crawled away toward the driveway where I had stored her former cage.  Once beneath it, she raised herself up and climbed inside the bare metal structure.  I experienced a kind of rejection not felt since my high school dating failures.   

***

Pern is gone now, finally succumbing to a weakened immune system after she became egg-bound several years ago.  (You’ll never understand how alien it is to be male until you’ve lived in a 600-sqaure-foot house with an egg-bound, four-foot female iguana and four premenstrual women.)  The episode had caused her to lose most of her toes on her front claws, which hampered her climbing ability only to the degree that she looked less than graceful at it.

The girls probably won’t miss her slimy sneezes, her biting, clawing, and tail-lashings, intentional or not, or the aroma of her pasty excretions.  But I’m sure they will never forget her personality, especially the smug pleasure she took at maneuvering her way into the center of our family.

Regardless of what I said before, I never really came to despise her, although she was adept at pointing out my character flaws.  She was quick to correct any lapse I might have in attention paid to her.  Her needs were met or else, and I could assume nothing about those needs.  Perhaps if Pern had been a male iguana, things might have been different, more balanced.  As it is, I will always carry the scars of our relationship.

 

###

 

 

On Birds and Bees

 

           Like my own daughters, I learned about sex at an early age by watching animals.  From the age of five, I knew it took at least two (with some animals this wasn’t always certain) to make babies.  A girl and a boy hamster, and soon you had a dozen.  A girl and a boy cat, and you got kittens.  I don’t remember when I first made the connection from animals to people, but I reasoned it out fairly early on. 

            One part of the mystery I had completely missed, however: the issue of exactly where babies came from.  I’ve mentioned this before in other writing, but it bears repeating.  I knew that people had sex and became parents.  Simple, just like my pets.  My error came in believing that babies had to be surgically removed from their mothers, that the doctor cut open the mother’s belly and out popped a screaming child.  Even though I had seen several live births with my cats, I knew people were different because I had seen the scar.  My own mother showed it to me after my baby sister came home, answering in this way my awkward question.  She hadn’t exactly lied to me—all five of us kids had been born by C-section. 

            I didn’t learn the truth until I was fourteen.

            That summer of my fourteenth year, my stepfather, a staunch Catholic man who directed the church choir and worked for Bishop Green in the Tucson Diocese, took me fishing to give me “the talk.”  “Babies come out of wombs,” he said bluntly, “like Christ came out of Mary’s womb.”  Then he was silent.  That’s it?  I thought.  But wasn’t Mary a virgin?  Now my mind was really pressing the issue.  No matter.  That ended the discussion.  I realized later that this must have been his way of avoiding the delicate and uncomfortable subject that people actually had sex.

            Not that I could blame him.  I remember at that age being very concerned about having my own children one day and having to give them “the talk,” which I understood would be about more than just “wombs.”  Maybe I was embarrassed by the carnal knowledge I already possessed—from watching animals, that is.  (I and Mary held the same title, although mine resulted more from ineptitude than determination.)  Or maybe I feared sounding too textbook and clinical, as if I really had no idea what I was talking about (more likely).  From my stepfather I had learned that it would be my job to teach the boys the “facts of life,” as he liked to call the babies-out-of-wombs catechism, and my future wife’s duty to teach the girls.  I determined not to have any boys.

             Somehow I got lucky.  Karen let me off the hook three times, one baby girl after another.  I’m sure by now I could handle the birds and the bees discussion if I needed to.  After all, I’m much older, wiser, and more experienced, even if I still have to rely on a textbook once in a while, or the unabashed public displays of our pets.

            And where the animals fail, I’m confident that Karen can teach our girls what they need to know.  She’s taught me plenty.  As Karen says, sex is such as messy business.  “You start sleeping with guys and it’s like you’re connected by the hips.  The only thing stopping me from having one-night stands is that I can’t figure out how to get rid of the guy afterward.”  She mentions this both as a lesson to our daughters and as a warning to me.  I understand what she means.  Guys, like male cats, always hang around stinking up the place when they see a good thing.

***

          RainCloud is Melissa’s gray cat, which she named for a monsoon thunderstorm because “his fur looks just like a storm cloud.”  He also owns another name that I’ve affectionately christened him with: The ball-less wonder.

I really shouldn’t be so mean to him. He is, to his credit, an effective pack-ratter, slipping through the cat door on many evenings with one of the marble-eyed rodents that frequent our desert home and in the process infect us with welt-raising kissing bugs.  He’s invariably quite proud of himself, mewing in short staccato through a mouthful of rat and lungs short of breath, to announce to his family that he has once again worthy of our affection (and fresh milk) even if the only response he gets is “RainCloud!  No!  Take that back outside!”  Sometimes he comes inside with his provision after we’re in bed (or when no one is home) at which point he takes it upon himself to eat the whole thing and leave us only a steaming gut pile for leftovers.  Sometimes I awaken at night to the crisp sounds of skull-crunching.  I hear it in my head as I write this, a sound that’s both particular and unmistakable, like when someone steps on eggshells.  It’s a sound that freezes movement.  The carpet in one corner of our home is permanently stained Berber maroon.

Yes, RainCloud catches all our unwanted rodents, the pocket mice that skitter along the flagstone walkway, the woodrats that live in the fountain and chew on the plumbing.  Unfortunately, he also catches the button-cute bunnies just out of the nest that according to the girls’ grandmother are cared for by God, together with a colorful assortment of grandmother’s wild birds—Gambel’s quail with erect panache’s and plump Colonel Sander’s breasts and bright pyrrhuloxias with feathers like ripened mangos.  I remember the time we took RainCloud to the veterinarian for X-rays due to an intestinal blockage.  There on the film, in the perfect death-curl of an Archaeopteryx fossil released from its stone, was the skeleton of a bird.  “Had some breakfast this morning?” the vet asked RainCloud.

But despite his hunting prowess, RainCloud is less than he seems.  His blood surges with the chemical excitement of the hunt but it’s testosterone free.  RainCloud drinks decaffeinated while all the other Toms in our neighborhood suck down Jolt.  I suppose I should feel sorry and have more compassion on him in his more neutral condition.  It’s not his fault his owners are girls and that in their minds all males are better off “fixed.”  Of all the surgical procedures performed in the world, why is removing a certain, perfectly functional, part of the male anatomy termed “getting fixed.”  What is it, you suppose, that they think is broken?   Poor RainCloud, now an adult “male” cat is defenseless against sprayers, all the unneutered cats that come around marking their territory virtually in RainCloud’s path.  Talk about getting sand kicked in your face.

This is why, the other day, I suddenly became so proud of him.  For a moment, anyway. 

We’d been having some problems with the neighborhood Toms, more problems than usual.  Two of them we didn’t recognize, a dingy yellow tabby and a jet black fellow.  Normally about evening, these two new cats would begin to yowl, which was always very upsetting to RainCloud and our new adoption, BobbySox.  Bobby is a tailless—and I mean truly tailless, not even a stub but only a tuft of fur—runt that we found at Kennedy Park living out of a dumpster.  The girls call her “Bob” for short.  She’s a gray shorthair with the body of a cottontail rabbit and is kind and affectionate and loves to have her face brushed.  But she’s also a coward.  When the yowling begins, she heads for the closet. 

I could have dealt with the noise and the cat hiding behind our clothes, but something had to be done once the strays discovered how to use the cat door and empty the cat dish and then decided to make the inside of our home an extension of their scent-marked territory.  Karen, in a way that all married women seem to accept as their God-given right, blamed her husband—me.  She made the stink my responsibility with two words that carry the weight of all female vocabulary if not the whole English language.  She said, “Do something!”  The implied “you” meant me.

I borrowed a trap, baited it with kibble, and caught one cat—a third Tom that I hadn’t seen before.  This one had chewed rings on the sides of its head for ears.  I drove it farther out into the desert and released it, feeling sorry for it and not knowing what else to do.  Weeks went by, the spraying continued (one cat got bold enough to enter our home even while we watched but would dart away as soon as anyone moved), the trap remained untouched, and Karen’s complaints grew louder and more insistent. She blamed me, the male with (only) a vasectomy.  I, in turn, blamed RainCloud, the ball-less wonder.

Then one day I found him in the desert rolling in his favorite dirt hole and covering his long gray coat with warm dust the color and texture of talcum powder.  So pathetic.  As I approached, he turned belly up hoping for a good scratching.  I wasn’t amused.  He would probably track the dirt inside and deposit tiny petals of grit wherever his toe pads rested on my computer and desk.  “RainCloud,” I said.  “You’re fat and lazy and worthless.  And not only that, but you’re a putz.”  Putz was my favorite name to call him.  He may have understood me, because just then the black and yellow Toms began howling at each other about fifty feet away and RainCloud jumped to his feet and charged straight for the pair.  I couldn’t believe it.  He dove into the middle of them, dust and fur flying as the cats’ cries pitched in octave and amplitude.  I ran toward the melee.  The two strays took off in opposite directions, leaving RainCloud victorious with a mouthful of fur.  “Alright, RainCloud!”  I shouted.  “That’s what I’m talking about!  Good Boy!”  My faith in the male species, in his manhood and mine, had been restored.  I lifted him into my arms and pulled the fur from his mouth.  It was then that all my newfound respect for him fell, that everything in the world went wrong.  The fur was gray.  His fur.  Long strands of it plumed away like puffs of smoke from a limp, wet matchstick.  RainCloud, in the excitement of the battle, had bitten himself.

            RainCloud is just one of the many cats we’re neutered over the years, and so far he’s survived the longest (ten years), if you don’t start counting over after his six-month-long “disappearance” a few years back.  (This is another story.)  He came to us as Melissa’s first kitten when Melissa was eight after a friend of hers from school found her own cat very pregnant and desperately wanted to get rid of the impending litter before it became an impending litter of doom.  Karen and I agreed that Melissa could pick out one kitten, but we made the mistake of taking along her two sisters.

            Along with RainCloud arrived Mittens, Kasondra’s Siamese-looking half-breed, and Periwinkle, Jessica’s calico-looking thoroughly mixed-up-breed.  Despite Melissa’s objections, I called RainCloud “Gizmo” (he wasn’t old enough yet to become the ball-less wonder) mostly because of the kitten’s crazy antics, the running and climbing and chasing after nothing in his particular supercharged spastic way.  But of the three kittens, Mittens was the weirdest.  He had no bones.  When you picked him up he would lie in your hands like a rag doll.  And he didn’t seem to mind what position you twisted him into, or, as he grew older, what position RainCloud twisted him into. 

            Karen knew it was time to neuter them both when one day she heard Kasondra complain, “RainCloud’s humping Mittens!”  Never mind that both cats were males—Kasondra seemed more concerned about the humping part than who was humping whom.

            This, however, wasn’t the beginning of Kasondra’s sex education.  Although I have no idea where she picked up the word—certainly not from public school—she knew about “humping,” nature’s messy business of exchanging genes within the pool (this is why I don’t swim in public pools) so species don’t stagnate in some backwater lagoon.  (Creatures of the Backwater Lagoon?)  She had already seen humping performed outstandingly with a pair of western box turtles.

 

            “My first box turtle’s name was Herman,” I told Kasondra, after a friend of hers gave her one of the grassland terrapins a few months after her tenth birthday.  The animal had been living for several years in a small, ten-gallon aquarium in a bedroom away from natural light and fresh air.  If turtles can look anemic, this one certainly did.  Its domed carapace and flattened plastron were dingy gray and flaxen instead of the normal olive and yellow; the scaly flesh of its appendages and head, when these were visible and not tucked into shell, seemed as pasty as doll skin.  This was an animal that needed desert underfoot and sunlight overhead, not life in a fish tank.

            I went to work constructing an outdoor enclosure in our yard.  Because box turtles like to dig but cannot climb, I had to focus more on what lay beneath the ground.  I decided to make the enclosure oval in shape, about six feet by four and set about digging up an area with pick and shovel.  Kasondra helped, mostly by watching and bringing me glasses of water.  I needed to go at least three feet deep if we wanted the turtles to have room enough to tunnel, especially before winter when I knew the reptiles would disappear underground for several months for their period of aestivation, the cold-blooded (exothermic) version of mammalian hibernation.

            Kasondra wanted her box turtle, which she named Hermit (because of a supposed proclivity toward living in holes in the ground?), to be able to aestivate because she had read that the animals need this period of sleep to reproduce successfully.  And she had plans on finding a “husband” for Hermit.

            It took all day to excavate the turtle pen, spread the bathtub-size pit with heavy galvanized fencing, stake up the perimeter with the same wire, and fill it back in.  Kasondra constructed a “turtle house” of stones and wood that looked like a miniature, open-sided Navajo hogan and planted a Texas ranger and fountain grass for shade. While I finished with a “pond” made from a buried cat litter pan, she collected interesting rocks to decorate the pen and give Hermit “something interesting to look at.”

            Hermit accepted her new home with much grace, promptly burying the rocks and digging up the plants.  She preferred her pond double as a mud bath.  On opening day, Kasondra gave her fresh strawberries to eat as a treat but she wouldn’t touch them.  She only wanted her favorite—canned monkey chow.

            Hermit’s color and attitude soon improved.  She enjoyed being outdoors, basking in the sun and roaming around her enclosure to inspect every nook, every new insect that stumbled in.  She developed a fondness for grubs and worms, and she would eat them with obvious relish on her face. The turtle had a lot of character for a reptile.  What Hermit didn’t like, however, was the new husband.

            Kasondra and I found Kermit at a nearby pet store.  Kermit was a male box turtle, slightly larger and darker than Hermit but my daughter thought he would be a good match.  I was suspicious.  There was something in Kermit’s eyes, something behind the fiery red irises.

            When Kasondra introduced him to Hermit, we had no doubt of his maleness.  Unlike RainCloud, out neutered cat, Kermit had hormones—a high concentration of them by the looks of it.  His gonads were undoubtedly pumping quantities of testosterone into his hot reptilian bloodstream, too hot for any normal red-blooded male turtle.  Kasondra was about to get her first lesson on sex, and not the kind of sex she already understood: that it takes both mommies and daddies, preferably married to each other, to make babies.  This was much worse.  This was turtle sex in all its glory.  Before now, I had been curious.  How do turtles, shells and all, actually “do it?”  Snakes at least can entwine.  Lizards have arms and legs unencumbered with interlocking scutes of bone and keratin.  How do turtles get around those horny breastplates?  I had read about the member that looks like a purple flower.  I had to cover my eyes.

            Hermit, apparently, didn’t want to be married to Kermit.  She took one look at him and his red eyes bearing down on her and she took off for the fence line.  There are times when turtles can be really fast.  But Kermit would not be denied.  Weren’t there other box turtles with him at the pet store?  Kermit acted as if he’d never seen the female form—as it pertains to oblate turtle forms—before meeting Hermit.  That is, until he finally caught up with her.

            This is where you may want to cover your eyes too.

            It turns out, I learned rather graphically, that male box turtles have special adaptations for dealing with cumbersome shells when mating.  One of them, of course, is an extremely long…tail.  This very articulate, nearly prehensile appendage could pry open the valves of a modest and tight-lipped oyster.  The other adaptation is a set of short, thick, and curved hind claws.  These work to hold onto the female in a way that is most surprising, at east it was to me when I first witnessed Kermit employ them with Hermit.  For once he made connection, his tail firmly in place between her plastron and carapace and his toenails locked tightly onto the rear margin of her shell, he would relax and flip over onto his back allowing Hermit to drag him around the enclosure as if she were pulling a toboggan.

            I remember how Kasondra, less shocked by Kermit’s display than I, gave Karen the play by play from the yard to the house.  “He’s going straight for her,” she shouted to my wife who was inside on the phone.  “She’s trying to get away, but he’s shoving and biting her.  Now he’s circling around her and climbing on her.  He’s turned over on his back!  He has a big smile on his face!”

            All that summer and into the fall, right up to the first pacific cold fronts that carried the signals for aestivation, Kermit couldn’t leave Hermit alone.  Kasondra, instead of borrowing the name of a sexless Muppet character, should have bestowed on him the more appropriate name of “Randy.” 

***

            During the years of my daughters’ sex education at home (Karen insisted they not take this particular health class at school, which to her seemed more about contraception than biology), all of the pets in our home save one were female.  Pern, a large female green iguana.  Sally, the tiger salamander.  Hermit.  RainCloud and Mittens being neutered, didn’t count.  (It’s been tough for males growing up in a household of four women.  I know.  I went through my own humiliation with the urologist at about the same time the boys suffered theirs with the vet.)  Only Kermit the box turtle held onto his manhood, and what a fine example of manhood he demonstrated.

            Perhaps it was Kermit’s modeling of the male species that impressed my daughters that girls should rule.  It certainly wasn’t my own sweaty, burping, butt-scratching behavior.  Maybe, they figured, there was a better way?  In our own desert, a species of whiptail lizard has only females in the population, the reptiles laying eggs that hatch into more female lizards without the benefit of males. A human society without males?  We seem to be headed in that direction already with sperm banks and artificial insemination, surrogate mothers and human cloning.  The only thing we’re good for anyway is reaching things on high shelves and changing light bulbs, cabinets and fixtures built by men in the first place so we might prove our worthiness to sweat and burp around the house.

            Of course my daughters entertained these thoughts mostly before puberty, at which point hormones wipe the slates clean of such ideas and all the male dweebs, nerds, slobs, jerks, and (you fill in the blank with what suits you) suddenly metamorphose into the most wonderful creatures on two legs.  In short, despite what Jane Austin says, hormones make all of us losers into Mr. Darcys.

            I know my daughters will argue this with me.  They’ve read the Austin novels.  They’ve categorized all the males they know into the proper character type so that they might understand how to precede with them, so that they might avoid the selfish, offensive Mr.Collinses and  pursue the quiet, proud (and rich) Mr. Darcys.  But I know the truth.  I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes.  When the hormones are churning, Jane Austin is shelved, forgotten, sold back to Bookman’s.  Boys are boys.  All one needs to do is look in their direction, and my daughters will swoon.  At least Austin’s Elizabeth waited to see Darcy’s mansion before she cast her eyes in his direction.

            I like to think that my girls have standards when it comes to boys.  And I suppose they do.  They won’t date just anyone—he has to have two legs.