“I miss having a pet,” I say to my old friend Earl Buckmaster.
“So get a pet,” says Earl.
“Can’t. Too hard to have a pet when you travel.”
“Take ’em with you,” says Earl.
“We fly. I don’t want to lug a dog or cat on an airplane.”
“Get a lizard,” says Earl. “That’s what I had when I was a kid. They’re small enough to put in your carry-on.”
“A lizard?” I say. “Really?”
“Yup. Aunt Helen took a trip to Arizona and brought a pet lizard back for me. I kept it in a little cage, but I’d take it out so it could catch bugs.”
“Not a very cuddly pet,” I say. “Probably hard to teach to fetch or roll over.”
“True. You can’t teach an old lizard new tricks, but it’s fun to watch them eat flies,” says Earl.
“Did you name him?” I ask.
“Her. I called her Lizzy. Good names for lizards are hard to come by,” says Earl.
“How long did you have her?” I ask.
“Well, I got her when I was 8, lost her when I was 10, and got her back when I was 11. She died, bless her cold-blooded heart, a couple of years later. Natural causes.”
“You lost her?” I ask, intrigued.
“Lizzy loved going to the beach,” he says. “On hot summer days, I’d take her down to the creek where there was a nice sandy bank. I’d sit there fishing while she played in the sand.”
“Out of the cage?” I ask.
“Of course. No point in taking a lizard to the beach if you’re going to keep her in a cage,” he replied.
“So she scampered off?” I ask.
“Not exactly. While I was sitting there, a bottle came floating by. I snagged it with my fishing pole. It had a note inside from a kid named Pete. He lived a half-mile upstream, and asked whoever found it in France to send him a letter. In English.”
“France?”
“It’s possible. Down the creek, into the river, into Lake Erie, over the falls, out the St. Lawrence — you get the point.”
“It only went a half-mile,” I say.
“That’s what I told Pete when I saw him in school. I never did write him a letter. In fact, I wrote my own letter, stuck it in the bottle and tossed it back in. I told the French person who found it to send me a letter.”
“Then I noticed Lizzy was missing. I looked all around that beach. I called her name until the sun went down. I finally had to give up on her and go home.”
“Did she usually come when you called her name?” I ask.
“Of course not. She was a lizard.”
“But you found her a year later?” I say.
“Not exactly,” he says. “But I got a package in the mail from some guy in Scudder.”
“Where’s Scudder?” I ask.
“Pelee Island. Southernmost part of Canada, in the middle of Lake Erie.”
“What was in the package?” I ask.
“The bottle with my note and a letter from the guy. Lizzy was in there too, along with a couple of flies the guy put in there to keep her happy.”
“She hadn’t been in the bottle for a year!” I say.
“Of course not. The guy said he had enjoyed getting to know Louis le Lézard since he found the bottle on the shore, but a year was long enough. So he finally mailed him back to me.”
“Louis le Lézard?” I say.
“Those French Canadians don’t know a Lizzy from a Louis,” says Earl. “Either that or my French teacher who translated his letter messed it up.”
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
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