The Battle Between the Gecko and the Cat

The gecko lost. We found the carnage all over the living room one morning. It is true: geckos lose their tails when scared. Apparently, at times, they also lose their heads, or the cat left the head as a warning to all the other geckos in the house. Geckos, we also learned, do not close their eyes upon dying. They stay open and beady. We’re assuming the battle was with a cat, though we don’t actually own one. The neighbors down the way do, actually I think they own two. I’m not sure, but I’ve found two cats in our house before when I come down in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.

            Kent volunteered to clean up the battle remains (good thing, because I would have just left them there and avoided the room all together until the cleaning lady came), while I distracted our son, Fyo. Fyo asked to watch a movie. We had started a video yesterday, one that Kent found at the de Young museum in San Francisco called The Way Things Go. Essentially it is a video of chain reactions using household items (ladders, tires, buckets, tea kettles, water, fire) and chemical reactions. Despite the lack of soundtrack, Fyo finds the video absorbing, as he watches one thing impact or set off another. The film is 30 minutes of pendulums knocking over glasses that set fire to plywood ramps that set off a tea kettle and so on. It's the kind of thing that inspires Kent about the possibility of home school and the kinds of things he could do with Fyo if we had a garage (or spare warehouse).

            After we finished the morning’s viewing, I suggested we get dressed. I let Fyo pick out his clothes – actually, there’s not much option these days, either he wears what he wants or he doesn’t wear anything and I’m not one for power struggles. I don’t see the point in demanding him to wear what I want him to, except he often picks out his 100% polyester Dr. Seuss swim shirt (I surrender to this, but I worry that he gets hot). To go with his Dr. Seuss shirt, he also picked out his Power ranger underpants. Shorts were extraneous this particular morning.

             Kent offered to take Fyo for a walk, while I made breakfast. Since having a child, I think it is lovely to occasionally make breakfast by myself.

            Kent and Fyo were gone a long time. I had time to make breakfast and write in my journal. I didn’t think they could have gone that far, as Kent was in his plaid pajamas still, and Fyo in his swim shirt, Power Ranger underpants and his orange crocs.

            The magnificently dressed duo finally returned. Kent, it turns out, had taken him on a short motorbike ride Balinese style. Generally, on the motorbike, Fyo is strapped to Kent’s back in his ergo carrier, but the Balinese, with kids Fyo’s age will often let them sit on their laps or let the kids stand between the driver’s legs at the handlebars of the motorbike. Fyo rode standing – in his Dr. Seuss swim shirt, Power Ranger underpants, orange crocs and now brown helmet – at the handlebars. Kent meant to just take him around the neighborhood, up the road to the nesting place of the herons. He thought he would be able to turn around at the end of the road. He couldn’t. The road took him into the middle of Ubud, past the supermarket and up the main road towards home, all the while driving at parade pace with our magnificently dressed toddler honking the horn and singing. I said they looked like something out of Richard Scarry’s Car and Trucks and Things that Go.

In the world of things that go

            The three of us were on the motorbike, on a narrow little path that bordered a rice paddy. Kent cut it kind of close and at one point, sandwiched my right foot under another bike’s tailpipe. Some people, I hear, can contain themselves in vast amounts of pain. It turn out that I am not one of them. At first, I thought he broke my toes. I thought at the end of the month we are supposed to trek in Lombak and there is not enough gin in Bali to have me trek a mountain with a broken foot. I realized, however, that since I could walk, that he probably didn’t. Really, it’s just bruised. Nicely. It’s nicely bruised.

            Poor Kent felt so bad he bought me two kinds of chocolate at the grocery store.

In the world of the battle of the gecko and the cat

            Since the battle of the gecko and the cat, and finding gecko carnage spread across the living room, there has also been a drowning of a rat in the rice paddy. We see it when we drive or walk down the path to our house, the rat, belly up, paws in position ready to dog paddle before it realized it didn’t know how.It is one of those things that you don't want to look at, but can't really help looking anyway.

            Yesterday, we came home and found a small – small enough to be mistaken for a snake – eel in a plastic water bottle on our porch. We think it was dead but this we never confirmed. Apparently, Fyo was playing with the neighbor kids, Wayan and Kadek. Fyo saw the eel in the rice paddy, and Kadek got it for him. Generous fellow. We never learned who put it the water bottle for preservation.

           

In the world of cremation ceremonies and days of the dead

            Kent is beginning to wonder about all the dead animals that have showed up around our house. He wonders if it is symbolic of something or a forewarning of something - maybe, the death of one phase, so that another can begin. Our time in Bali is coming to a close, and we’ve been talking about how it will be good to get back to the states, as well as the things we look forward to doing there (mainly stopping by Trader Joe’s, buying all the truffle cheese that we can get our hands on, a nice bottle of wine, and cartons of half & half for our coffee). I wonder if all the dead animals are meant to give us pause, to have us stop and look where we are, to be present as they say in yoga or meditation.

            Or it doesn’t mean anything, except a gecko met its end in our living room, a rat drowned, and the neighbor kid shoved an eel in a bottle as an offering of friendship.