I thought the appearance of the Lizard of Resolved Paradoxes the other day was a random, isolated event, but I was wrong.

Yesterday when I went to Bonny Doon for Friday Jasper and Betta Time, we met that lizard’s brother (sister?). While exploring a greenhouse at the farm next door, we heard a scuttling within a watering can. I looked inside. “Jasper, it’s a lizard!” I yelped. Jasper has been trying to catch a lizard ever since he moved to the country last month, to no avail. Here was his chance. “Just reach into this watering can,” I told him. “There’s no way he can escape you now.” Jasper put in his hand and after a few moments of frantic struggling (lizard) and frantic giggling (Jasper), his hand emerged holding a lizard by its tail. Victory!

Ah, it is a sweet moment, that first lizard capture. What a privilege to see it happen to my favorite person.

Jasper was thrilled by his catch and determined to keep the lizard for a pet. But he’s a four-year-old boy who needs both hands for important investigations, so it fell to me to carry the lizard in my right hand (my left hand was already occupied by an overflowing basket of strawberries) as we made our way slowly back home. We made many stops and detours, as we always do, each detour being its own separate story. The lizard grew still and solemn in my hand during this long journey.

Occasionally Jasper tried to gain its trust by petting its tiny head and speaking to it in soothing tones, but the hearts of newly captured lizards are not to be won in this way, and the poor thing thrashed about alarmingly in my hand. “Come on, Jasper, let’s take this guy home!” I urged my fearless leader. “He doesn’t like the feeling of being held by a human.” Jasper asked why he didn’t like that feeling, and what would a human hand feel like to a lizard, and many other questions allowing for deliciously vast leaps of imaginative speculation.

When we reached home, Nathan was surprised to see what we’d found. He told me that Jasper had dreamed about a lizard that morning, and upon waking had sleepily asked Nathan “what kind of lizard was that?” I told him I’d written a blog post about a lizard just two days before. We didn’t have time to analyze the synchronicity just then, because this real-life lizard needed a place to stay. Nathan provided the perfect box, to be filled with lizard-oriented stimuli, and the beleaguered reptile was released from my oppressive human grasp at last.

Jasper wanted to find some food for our lizard, and possibly another lizard to be his friend, so we set off down the road with a butterfly net and a specimen bag. On the road, we had a very interesting conversation, another thing we always do. This is what Jasper looked like when the discussion got deep:

In the photo above he looks to me like the most perfect combination of the expression and posture of both his parents, two people who are capable of dropping into profound discourse with anyone at a moment’s notice. It’s one of those fascinating glimpses of the adult he will become.

It should be noted, however, that his parents rarely have this much dirt on their faces.

Part of our conversation was about numbers. Jasper is beginning to think about them frequently and apply them to real life. The numberless sea of his babyhood seems to me like it happened just last week, so it felt strange to watch him using his fingers to add up how many cars had passed us since we started our walk (four! unusual for that amount of time on a country road like his).

We did not, however, catch any animals, even though Jasper practiced by catching himself.

When we returned from our search, it was time to have a good look at the lizard. Our new friend was placed upon a variety of surfaces, and held upside down, and probed and tickled all over his indignant lizard body. His scratchy toes were observed and discussed, and his colorful belly was greatly admired.

With all of this scrutiny, the lizard’s anxiety level began to rise again; he went into frenzies of motion that made him very hard to hold onto. I remembered the lizards of my childhood, and knew that a time was soon to come when one of these bids for independence would succeed. And so it did: he got away!

His adventure had a happy ending, if lizards who are uprooted from their homes and transported to new locations can ever be happy again. He escaped from Jasper, and ran under the deck, where we are sure he has found the peace and quiet and insects we couldn’t provide for him in our human world, and where nobody holds him upside down by his tail.