Suddenly, before my eyes

postvixen inquires:

What is the most strange/anomalous/magical/inexplicable "that shouldn't be there but I'm glad it is" thing you've seen in the last year?

I assume you don't mean the mornings when I wake up thinking "How in the hell did this child show up in my house? Wow, he's gorgeous!" or "Why the heck are my breasts leaking?" Unfortunately, although I'm sure there were some number of these in the past year, I don't remember them. So, I'll tell you an old one.

It was late in 1996, and Bard and I were in Long Island, picking up the pictures from our wedding, in the town where we got married, where my stepmom and dad lived. It was a kind of a melancholy visit, because in the months between taking the pictures and picking them up, my father had died suddenly. So we looked at all the pictures of him smiling with us, and realized we couldn't go show them to him.

As we stepped out of the studio and went to our car, I looked at the building across the street and saw a giant concrete lizard, six foot tall and painted bright green, right in the middle of a suburban commercial street, where there had not been one when we'd dropped off the proofs a month before. I blinked, and looked again, and asked Bard. He saw it too.

Turns out that the Long Island Reptile Museum had just opened there. We went in and looked at snakes and lizards and iguanas, animals for which I've always had a fondness. There was a live show with a tame albino python, and we sat there on the floor of a room covered in black cloth with a few seven year olds and watched the college student handler show how tame she was.

The afternoon was still surreal, but an entirely different flavor of surreal than when we went in. I hear the place closed down within a year or two, sadly. But I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it.

EDIT: Apparently, they've reopened.