Geckos, Ladybugs & the connection of the shin bone to the knee bone

The geckos here are not like the green gaudy Geico Gecko. First, they are not green, and second, they do not talk. They are shy fast little devils who skitter away at my approach, although once in a while one will skitter and stop and fix me in its tiny beady gaze.

The first time a gecko startles me, I burst out with “What you do, boss?” without thinking, and without, as far as I know, ever having said that exact thing before. It actually sounds more like whachu do, boss? And every time since, whenever a gecko is on a path close to mine, I say aloud the same thing, as a greeting.

Which reminds me of ladybugs. I give the name Thomas to the first ladybug I ever meet. I am three or four. My mother wants to know why I call the bug Thomas and I have no answer. (She must have been pleased, because that was the name of her much-loved and long dead father.) So I have always called ladybugs Thomas and I always will.

This is in Troy, New York, on McChesney Avenue. We move to Troy from Wichita, Kansas because my father gets a job working or teaching at Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute. For many years in our house in Ottawa a kitchen drawer holds a bottle opener made from aluminum anodized in a pink colour with RPI incised on it.

The house in Troy was an old rambling two-story house and years later when I remembered it fondly to my mother she said, “But you don’t remember – it had no closets.” I have many memories from Troy.

I pass through Troy in the early 2000s, driving from Nova Scotia to Kansas for a To Kill a Mockingbird event. It is late April. My way takes me near Troy and I decide to make the small detour to see if anything will stand out for me. I have not been there since 1959. I drive into town on a busy, box-store-lined wide street. As Bruce Cockburn wrote, the skin around every city looks the same. But even so: I get a feeling, and I pull into a gas station. I ask a guy if McChesney is around and really I’m not sure if that is the exact name of the street. I’m pronouncing more of a feeling than the actual name. All the same, “Yeah,” he says, “two streets back.”

I turn around the car and nose onto McChesney. Of course nothing is there – the Lindermans’ house where Sue cut her leg badly running through a pane of glass in their greenhouse is gone. There had been a nursery school, hadn’t there? Gone. All the houses gone. Wait. Am I recognizing the curve of the road? The feel of it?

And then, on the left, an abandoned empty house. No doubt holding out for some better offer from some enterprise. Our house. Our house is left. Behind it, where the farm had been, is a Wal-Mart. (Not our farm. A neighbour’s farm. Sue and I threw stones at the cows. The hired help was a man named Red. Sue fell in the ditch and the tractor almost ran her over.)

I get out. There is the living room window. There is the kitchen. There is the wooden garage where I threw a stone up in the air and it came down on Sue after I told her a million times to get out of the way. There is the yard where I met Thomas. There is the porch with the side door to the kitchen.

I climb the stairs to the porch and turn around and look out. There is not too much of a view, but in a place or two there is a patch of place from further off, and one of those tight views takes my breath away. Not too much would be remarkable to anyone else, just a water tower. One of the ones with many legs and a squat pregnant tank on top. I realize I am back at the source of my love for water tanks, and tanks especially that particular shape. Later there will be another tank like this one, just off Alta Vista Drive in Ottawa, by Randall Avenue where I will go to school. But there she be: the first tank of them all.

The house is still there on Google maps. I see it is still there, and it’s being renovated. It’s now light blue. I guess it’ll be there a while more.

For the house https://www.google.ca/maps/@42.744337,-73.642183,3a,75y,36.78h,71.07t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sBC2xw-D_Hk9Dx87k6kfu2A!2e0?hl=en

For the watertower (zoom in! zoom in!) https://www.google.ca/maps/@42.744354,-73.642483,3a,75y,238.52h,79.59t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sMgSOb6vaoM1Y-R7pycS0Ig!2e0?hl=en