For Griff, In Memoriam

W mentioned, the other day, that the store he works in had received in its shipment a hatchling Savannah Monitor - a creature that I have felt connected to since I was a child. I, of course, insisted on stopping by and paying the little darling a visit; as it curled its tiny tail around my thumb and gripped against my nail with its claws, the pebbly scales and flicking black tongue brought back a whirlwind of memories.

...

When I was ten, my parents bought me a little lizard for my birthday; I'd been keeping reptiles for a few years by that point - a gecko here, a tree frog there - and what I had wanted more than anything that year appeared in my bedroom that night with a bow on the corner of the four foot tank. A brown little scaly thing - no more than six inches long from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, as puffy and hissy and cantankerous as only a baby Savannah can be. Gryphon, or Griff, as I would come to call it, if he had survived, would have quickly become a four-foot phenomenon full of teeth and claws and the permanent scowl characteristic of most 'intelligent' lizards; as fate would have it, he passed away of unknown causes less than a year after I'd got him, leaving me to look back years later and admire (incredulously) my parents faith in me to have placed such a challenging creature under my charge. Thirteen years and a career in herpetology later, I can finally see what they knew all along.


Photo courtesy of: http://musicalpeace.org/vyoma/Photos/FIRS/savannah_monitor_02_092802.jpg