Great Lizard Chase of 2017: Do you agree with Sweetums or me?

[Kelly Kazek] OK, so it wasn’t all that great. And it wasn’t really a chase. But it did involve a lizard. A small one, but still …

Sweetums has been laughing at me for two days (periodically, not continuously. That would be creepy.) He’s been laughing over an incident I had with a lizard that got into our house.

Let me just say, I am not afraid of lizards. I would even catch one in my hands to put it outside. But I don’t like chasing them. Firstly, they’re fast little buggers; secondly, I find their skittering along my kitchen floor slightly disturbing.

So here’s what happened: I was headed out to walk my Trusty Sidedog Lucy on my lunch break. I’d opened the front door, leash in hand, and then the storm door, when a greenish-yellow gecko-looking critter skittered past into our entryway. I left Lu on the front porch so she wouldn’t eat it, then proceeded to look for a way to put the little fella back outdoors because, no matter what Geico says, lizards are not the indoor types. They can’t even reach the toilet handle.

Any-hoo, it was sitting on the baseboard when I leaned down to grab him. Too slow. In a flash, he was beneath the small chest in the entryway that we use as a catch-all for mail, keys, Bigfoot souvenirs, a brick from a haunted insane asylum … you know, the usual household stuff. I pulled the chest out from the wall a few inches and didn’t see the little guy, who by now I had named Odds, as in Lizard of Odds. The chest has a base that has a solid front and sides but has a two-inch gap above the floor in the back so, momentarily, he was corralled under there.

Quickly, I ran to the kitchen for a plastic container. When I came back I tried to coax Mr. Lizard from beneath the chest so I could plop the container over him, and then figure out later how to get him and the container out the door. “Here, lizard, lizard, lizard” didn’t work, so I tried thumping the front of the chest to startle him out. Then I moved the chest slightly. Still, he didn’t come out.

So I did what any right-thinking woman would do in this situation, I grabbed some duct-tape, purple of course, and slapped a piece over the two-inch gap between the chest back and the floor. Then I called Sweetums at work, hoping he could somehow, with his mind or something, get the lizard out of my house. At this point, I was mainly worried about the pets eating him. I didn’t want to be cleaning one day and find half a lizard beneath the sofa cushion (well, it’s not like I really clean under those. But we do lift them regularly to look for the remote.)

Sweetums wondered what he was supposed to do from his office so we finally agreed I would leave Lizard of Odds beneath the chest until Sweetums came home and we could both catch him. I explained to Sweetums about the duct tape and moving the chest and worried aloud that I may have already squished him.

“Or what if he tries to get out and sticks to the back of the duct tape?” I asked, suddenly filled with dread. Sweetums did the unthinkable: he laughed.

I told him I was seriously worried so Sweetums pulled out all that wisdom he got from college watching “The Big Bang Theory.” He brought up Schrodinger’s cat. If you aren’t a physicist or don’t watch the show, you’ll just have to look it up. But basically, Sweetums was telling me as long as I didn’t know it was dead, I was free to assume it was alive under there.

I spent the rest of the day wondering about poor Odds. Was he frightened? Was he hungry? Was his wife waiting for him at home, or perhaps a girlfriend who wanted to watch Netflix and cuddle on a limb?

The end of the story is horribly anti-climactic. Sweetums came home and lifted the chest and … there was nothing there. Either the lizard had run off while I was getting the duct tape, or the tape didn’t cover the space well enough.

We’d known each other only a brief time yet I wished Odds Godspeed and hoped he wouldn’t become kitty food. That night, as we were getting into bed, I asked Sweetums if the lizard could get under our bedroom door. He said yes.

“What about onto the bed?”

“I’m sure it could,” he said.

I shuddered and said I would hate to awaken to the sensation of him crawling on me, no matter how close we’d gotten.

The Sweetums had to say, “What if you don’t wake up. You may not ever even know he was crawling on you.”

Yeah, I didn’t get much sleep that night. Sweetums still thinks my actions were hysterical. I say I am a considerate lover of all God’s creatures. Whose side are you on?