When my college-student son informed me that his mother (we’re divorced five years now) had bought him a baby iguana, I wrote it off as a young man’s fancy fueled by his mother’s new-age, middle-age reshaping of her life mode.  She had herself recently purchased an iguana for her home, and everything new that she did she enthusiastically promoted to others as the answer to the riddle of a happy and fulfilling existence.  (Not a bad trait, necessarily, but not part of my personality.)  Besides, I was a dog man from way back—a dogged dog man, you might say—and the notion of a lizard as a pet left me, excuse the easy reptilian metaphor, cold.

            When I visited David one winter evening at the house he shared with several other stalwart young gentlemen, idealistic but sensible and passing to a new stage of life all, he showed me “ Kingston ,” as he had named his lizard, for the capital of Jamaica, where iguanas ran free.  (Or stared free, as the case may be.  They spend a lot of time crouched in one position, staring into space.  They don’t really run much.)  As David took Kingston from his cage, my first surprise impression was that of a cute little green guy with a sweet, sensitive face and a kind of cool intelligence that seemed to suggest a secret, that he was holding something back.  I could tell my son was proud of him.

            “Want to hold him?” David asked.  I felt a strong, sudden stab of worry.

            “I don’t know,” I said.  “What will he do?”

            “Just relax and he’ll be all right,” David said.  “He’ll just sort of sit on your hand.”  

            “OK,” I said, not believing entirely, but wanting to please my son.  I stuck my hand out flat, fingers together, thumb in.  I was anything but relaxed. 

            That next summer, David’s house lease expired and his friends dispersed and he moved back in with me on a temporary basis.  Kingston, with his clear plexi-glass cage, moved with him, installed in a small living room off the entrance hallway to my house.

            Left alone frequently, Kingston and I began to become acquainted on a one-to-one basis.  It fell on old dad to feed and water him and to keep his cage filled with clean white straw.  One day I put his overhead light on an automatic timer that David said gave a healthy regularity to Kingston’s nights and days.  I chopped up tiny platefuls of yellow squash and green beans and other vegetables (variety in diet is good for lizards) and placed them carefully in a bowl on the floor of his cage.  In short, I found myself taking a regular shine to little Kingston, sweet, noble little Kingston, gentle, poetic Kingston.

            “What would happen if Kingston got out of his cage?” I asked David one day.

            “We’d never see him again,” David said.  I waited until David left the house to check the seams on Kingston’s cage.  Sure enough, one joint needed to be taped.  

            I didn’t hold Kingston much (I feared he would squirm away), but I watched him often—constantly, in fact.  He was shy but very calm, almost yogi-like in his self-possession.  If I entered the room while he was poised over his food plate, he stopped still, with his mouth open, refusing to move until I left.  He didn’t want anybody to see him eat.  He probably didn’t want anybody to know his religious preferences, either.  He liked to keep some things secret.

            As a 21-year-old young man living at home with his father, David was 99% agreeable and charming, but there were occasional, understandable spells of non-communication or discontent.  He wanted to be out pursuing his dreams. He wanted to carve out his own niche.  But it was a sure-fire positive whenever I mentioned old Kingston.  Kingston drew us together in a common bond of lizard admiration.  But it was more than that, really.  It was a sharing of beliefs, a similar outlook, an intergenerational crossing.  Like our mutual enjoyment of organized sports, it was an oblique but effective way for us to communicate as two mature gentlemen living in this world that contained both paradise and thorns.

            “Look where Kingston is today!” I said, pointing to the cage where Kingston might be crouched with one delicate webbed foot splayed out over a leaf.  “Kingston climbed up his branch.”  “Kingston is suspended from the roof.”  When David came home with a new floor heater for the cage, we were both excited as Kingston seemed pleased, standing on the heater for hours, motionless, content, soaking in the invisible rays.  

            We joked that Kingston was an intellectual, a sage, a guru, withdrawn into himself while mulling over difficult questions of metaphysics and cybergenics.  We said that Kingston was a fan of reggae music and late night comedy shows, some on the raunchy side. 

            Life went on.  The Christmas season was hectic and fast-paced.  My daughter Kate returned home for a month-long stay from a college on the East Coast, filling the household with her cheerful and chatty personality and a steady stream of polite and congenial friends, girls and boys both.  There was music in the air.  As all this activity swirled around me, I felt comforted, contented, joyful almost, coming to grips at last with all the recent changes in my life, able now to look, at least tentatively, to the future.  A future.  My future. 

            One night, just after New Year’s, I stopped short as I walked through Kingston’s room, something catching my eye.  I rushed over to the cage, lifted the lid, thrust my hand inside.  Kingston was motionless as always, but there was something about the quality of his motionlessness that concerned me.  I touched him with a sense of foreboding.  His body was stiff and withered and lifeless.  His eyes reflected nothingness.  He was gone from this earthly realm, no more cognizant than the straw that lined his cage.  He was dead. 

            A huge sense of loss floated up from my body as I stood by Kingston’s cage, wishing, praying that this terrible thing wasn’t true.  “This is awful,” I blustered.  “This is awful.”  I paced for hours in a restless, feverish state, waiting for David to return home so I could tell him the news.  My voice was barely under control as I led him to the cage where Kingston lay still.  I couldn’t move him yet.  I had to wait for David to see him first. 

            “I don’t know what could have happened,” I lamented.  “I don’t know what I could have done different.”   David looked at me as if to provide guidance and counsel.  He shook his head.

            “Kingston was really small to begin with, Dad,” David said.  “He probably had some kind of congenital problem.”  We shared a moment of sadness and grieving as two strong men and then began the attempt to move forward, as the living must do.  

            The next morning, at David’s suggestion, I buried Kingston’s little body in our back yard beside our Chihuahua Chelsea in what I might now call a family pet burial plot.  It was a peaceful place, at the top of a gentle slope angling down to a patio at the edge of the house.  Standing there, shovel resting on the ground, I realized that Kingston represented many important things to me—David choosing to move back home, albeit temporarily, and that I could provide a safe, secure place for him; my loving him through this pet he had first loved; even the fact that his mother had bought Kingston for him held significance for me, reminding me of our long lost love, those early, dizzy days of romance, the difficult but rewarding years of child-raising, the plans and career moves and next steps.  The moments that David and I shared discussing Kingston, the humor, the good-natured intellectual hypothesizing were priceless to me, a healing balm on my soul, a way for me to know that I could relate to someone that I loved.

            A few weeks later David moved out again, as someone his age should want to do, but just before he left his mother and he bought a new iguana to keep at my house until, supposedly, David could afford a deposit to keep it with him.  They were really just doing it for me.