November 6, 2010
Our chameleon was named Jasper,
and sometimes we found money in there with our peanuts.
I remember getting chameleon “brooches” at the State Fair of Texas when I was a kid. The chameleon had a string around its neck, with a safety pin on the other end to anchor to your clothes. Our chameleon was named Jasper, and he lived 3 years.
That’s my Dallas friend Susan Sanders Wansbrough talking. She confirmed my memory of State Fair chameleons and told about Jasper.
I recall girls arriving at school bright and early with limp chameleons pinned to their blouses. The chameleons would grow ever more limp and finally succumb around mid-afternoon. Susan said that her father had agreed to buy her a chameleon only because he assumed it would expire the next day, but “a diet of mealworms kept it going long past the usual lifetime for chameleon brooches.”
We shared more bizarre memories of childhood in Dallas.
I spoke of another of my obsessions, “Strange As It Seems” peanuts, although they were not, I believe, exclusive to Dallas. (Unlike the monkeys who lived at the Volk’s department store in the Wynnewood shopping center. The monkeys were Dallas natives, or at least residents. I do not know if they ate “Strange As It Seems” peanuts. But I digress. The monkeys are a whole ‘nuther story.)
Susan: Are you talking about those peanuts that came in the cardboard tube and sometimes had money in them?
Me: Damn right. “Strange As It Seems . . . there has been found . . . 5¢ — 10¢ — 25¢ — 50¢ . . . !” A free-floating question mark in a typeface I now associate with one-column-inch back-page ads for pamphlets from fake swamis. Some kids actually found coins — wrapped in wax paper — amongst the salted peanuts inside those cardboard cylinders. I am not sure how I got the notion that those things were produced in Dallas. I am probably wrong. But I am glad you recall them.
Susan: I used to get them at the grocery store in Groesbeck, Texas, when we’d spend the summer at our grandparents’. I occasionally found a nickle, and a dime once. But I spent a lot more on those wretched peanuts than I ever got back. An early introduction to gambling.
You know what’s funny, y’all? Aside from the peanuts and the chameleons? What kicked this exchange off was my reading some interesting information about Florence Nightingale courtesy of Cindy’s and Daryl’s friend Tom Sale:
So, Florence Nightingale left her pet owl (which she found at the Parthenon in Athens) in her attic while she prepared to go off to the Crimean War. It died, and she postponed her voyage while she made arrangements for it to be taxidermied. Would you have wanted this lady looking after you?! A few years before, she kept a chameleon on a trip down the Nile and it died, too. (Two more were released after she realized she was no lizard nurse.) Florence often made her French maid, Trout, suit up and parlay a few lunges.
comments
Leave a Reply
What protective coloration does a chameleon assume at the point of expiring? It would appear to be a failure.
So it would appear.
I don’t know about chameleons, but anoles turn brown at death. Dirt-colored. Flannery had several anoles as pets, and they are wonderful little creatures. I was especially fond of one named George.
Sheila, I’m enjoying Tom’s Florence Nightingale phase, too.
Tom’s just screamin’ Crimean-crazy, idn’t he? And don’t we love it.
I have never heard of such a thing. That seems completely bizarre. Until you think about wrapping thread around the legs of junebugs and walking them through the neighborhood, like a junebug bouquet.
June bug bouquet.
You could do that.
It was a real thing. Chameleon brooches were real. And some chameleons were liberated from brooch servitude. Like Jasper.
Jeez, who was the Parisian dandy who walked his jewel-studded tortoise through the arrondissements of fin de siècle Paris? Help me, people. Y’all know who I mean.
Okay, so it was not fin de siècle. But he was a fabled flâneur.
Derek? DEREK? Derek Whi-i-i-ite!
Wake up wake up wake up and help me.
It was probably seventh grade when I had a pin-on state fair chameleon. I seem to recall, once home with him, having to get a little plastic terrarium for him to live in and mealy worms for him to eat.
I am so glad that he did not starve to death, pinned to your madras shirt. Or whatever you wore the year before we met.
I wish my name was Trout so hard I can’t even believe it never occurred to me before this very second.
Actually, in typing the above sentence my brain gently reminded me of Trout Fishing in America, and Richard Brautigan, and how much I like those things and Trout isn’t a new idea at all.
Honey, you know my best friend (who, sad to say, died when he was 33 and I was 31), he and I, we loved the idea of “Trout” as a name, especially in cinematic references, and we loved barking out, “Trout!” at one another.
I’m awake now, though the rest of Rome isn’t (6:20 a.m. on Sunday morning).
Hmm, perhaps you’re thinking of Josephine Baker and her pet Cheetah? Or Ann Margret and her pet Cheetah?
My latest obsession (pet-wise) is to have a crow. But one that would be free to come and go. I wouldn’t keep a pet otherwise.
Our Kenyan friends with my name-sake goat also have a “pet” chameleon, it is in their yard and impossible to find.
My childhood never involved chameleon brooches. Just sea monkeys, which i suggested to our friends they buy as they were wondering where they could get brine to make their own olives. Anyone try using pet monkeys to get out of a pickle?
Since Baudelaire was first to Flaneur, perhaps you are thinking of him? My Italy-skewed google reveals this.
“To give some indication of the slacker-than-thou ethos that flourished in Paris Benjamin notes in Arcades: “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.” There arose also the custom of the aperitif and the cocktail hour.”
I mean Ann Margret and her pet TORTOISE. Speaking of Ann Margret, is it just me or is that Bye-Bye Birdie bit that they showed on Mad Men not like the most frightening and haunting thing you’ve ever seen?
I wish I were in Rome, awake or asleep, dead or alive.
Damn. It’s the dude who appears in fictionalized form in that dude’s novel, dude!
Some dude has GOT to know who I mean.
Also, sea monkeys.
Kilgore Trout.
I’m too haunted and too frightened without help from “Mad Men” and Ann-Margret.
“The Abominable Dr. Phibes.” Inspector Trout.
TROUT!
Huysman. À rebours. The tortoise-walker served as an inspiration. Oh, where is my mind?
Bed. Bed. I have a hot date with Morpheus.
G’night, y’all. It’s been real.
Good night, Gracie.
Your mind is in the toilet. Along with Kilgore Trout.
When my nephew Seth was little, he had a chameleon among his many pets. I was there one night and the boy said the chameleon had escaped from the cage in his room. We looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Seth, about 3 years old, was exhausted, sitting on the edge of his bed, in his pj’s, clutching his blanket. He said, “I don’t want to sleep with no lizard.”