Lizard: Part Two

Because my friend Lizard is not paying attention to my blog in the manner I think is appropriate. (meaning, at all) I am going to start posting regular funnies about her until she acknowledges I am here. If you know The Lizard, please inform her of this activity if she wants to stop the storytelling.

So, to recap, Lizard is a former Ballerina who can, while standing, raise her leg straight up to touch her knee to her ear. She is also a ballerina who wants to expand her creatively and starts to look at other performance avenues such as poetry and performance art.

I want to tell you about a summer that the Lizard came to live with me in Indianapolis. I lived in a little studio apartment in downtown Indy. I was a block of so from the Chatterbox and about three blocks from Monument Circle. I liked it for a lot of reasons, one of which was that I worked about a half block from my apartment. It took me about three minutes to commute to work.

Well, The Lizard had left Indianapolis on an adventure in a red Volkswagen van. She was traveling cross country with a friend and a big old fashioned typewriter. I am not going to tell the whole story of her adventure, but I will say that at some point things went bad and she came back and I agreed she could stay with me for a while. That led to the summer of the Julia Playhouse.

Lizard was there, writing, looking for work, trying to decide what to do next. I was there working, writing, going to Slippery Noodle for Readings and planning for my escape from Indiana. Our friend, we will call him ...... Barnes .... was working and hanging out with us. He lived up the street about a mile or so. And, then, sometime during this summer we met this kid who seemed creative, nice and had potential, but in the end turned out to be what he started as in the beginning -- a thief. He was a thief of ideas, focus, enthusiasm and, in the end, he stole really things from us like "stuff" and faith.

But, to the funny things. In this little (maybe 500 sq foot) apartment, we all hung out. We wrote, we created art with crayons, we celebrated, we danced. We ate bagels and bananas and we used lots of toilet paper. And I loved it. People were crashed out around the apartment, the energy was sparky and we laughed a lot.

One day, I came home from work. I must have been having a bad day. But, I had stopped on my way home for more bagels, bananas and, yes, toilet paper. I went up the elevator, opened the door to my apartment and there were Lizards and The Kid dancing around the living room. Now, somehow I don't think this is reality -- but I recall one of them doing a handstand on my rocking chair. The other dancing around the rest of the apartment.

This was my first sense of getting old. I was terrible jealous of their freedom as I worked all day at the newspaper, went and bought the necessities of our "family" and then came home to find play and creativity bursting around the apartment. For the first time probably in my whole life, I identified with my mother. Why did they get to have the fun while I worked and cleaned and bought the food. Now, in the end, the reality is that this was one of the most creative and wonderful summers of my life. But, that afternoon, that moment, I felt the burden that many "mothers" must feel. And, in the end, the work was worth the reward.

Here's the lesson from this: If we take care of people who need something, we learn and grow. In the end, what we get far exceeds what we invest every time. So, extending a helping hand always pays off in ways that investing in a stock never could.