FOXTROT, THE DOG, went to the vet’s to get smarter last Friday. (“Get smarter”: a family joke based on the Far Side cartoon in which the dog in the car gloats to the cat in the driveway, “I’ll be smarter than you when I get back because I’m going to the vet to be tutored!”)
Given her early morning appointment, the whole family piled into the car Friday morning, Foxtrot between the kids, two of the back seat’s occupants set for tutoring in school, one destined for the Gary Larson version of it at the RSPCA.
We left St Philip and, before reaching St John, we discovered Foxtrot has a tendency towards car sickness; and a good eye for aiming projectile vomit all over schoolboy’s socks.
My son, gifted with a keen sense of smell, began retching, too, but thankfully his breakfast stayed down. So with two out of three of the back seat occupants fighting car sickness, both within vomiting range of the driver – me – speed was of the essence.
A slow-moving car threatened to stick us in morning traffic. The difference between arriving at Bussa Roundabout at 7 a.m. and 7:04 a.m. could be 200 cars between you and the Barbados Community College.
I overtook the snail in a Yaris just as my daughter managed to get Foxtrot to the window, in case she should hurl again. The other driver, annoyed at being overtaken, directed the name of the female dog at my wife in the front passenger seat but it fell, accurately, upon Foxtrot.
As we overtook, my daughter, understandably, given her brother’s socks, began panicking about Foxtrot in her lap. We pulled into a lay-by and daughter and wife swapped seats faster than a methamphetamine-snorting Formula One pit stop crew in the last lap at Silverstone; we were back on the road before the slow car came around the bend.
With traffic at the BCC already backing up, I swung through the Back Ivy and down the little hill to rejoin the main road; you may never have noticed how far the bush grows out of the hill but, as of Friday morning, my daughter can tell you branches get close enough for a lizard to leap into the car.
One did.
My daughter began screaming. Her terror of lizards is entirely irrational, but no less intense for its irrationality. With one hand on the wheel, I grabbed for the lizard, which jumped off the dashboard and landed – somewhere.
Traffic, of course, would be moving very fast just at this point.
Where’s that so-and-so lizard? I wondered, at 50 kph – and then saw a green flash different from the one on the horizon, and felt something on my knee.
Of course, I was wearing shorts.
I jumped in my seat.
My son burst into his favourite Sparrow song, making necessary changes: “The lizard run up he leg/ And disappear!”
So, if you saw me behind the car door at the roadside, with my pants partially down, it wasn’t the call of nature; not the call you assumed it was, anyway.
