Beasts of Mystery!

     When my husband and I fell in love we had no idea that I would inadvertently help him solve a couple of the biggest puzzles of his life just by being who I am. Or more specifically, by being who I am in one case and in the other, being related to who I am. It just goes to show how much of life really does just come down to accidentally ending up in the right place at the right time. That he could have attached himself to me out of an unsuspected destiny of closure regarding these two random mysterious events is one of our in-jokes, like the one that he married me for those books – it was at the San Diego Comic Con, back when it was containable and fans and guests could actually mingle and so on. I’d just done the rounds of the used book areas and here he came through the throngs. We’d known each other for several years and were at the chatty-acquaintance level (it would be several more years before we noticed each other romantically), so he nodded and smiled, absolutely seething with internal envy, as I showed him the haul of rare Harlan Ellison books he would have killed to find first. And well, now, something like 33 years on, they’re as much his as mine – and as inaccessible to both of us, stuck as they are in storage on another continent and our asses way too broke to bring them over here. It is what it is.

     The first thing was the Living Frieze. Where we lived, there was a park in which was a museum atop which was a gigantic stone frieze of all types of animals and people. My husband had been there many times, but this time, walking past it, it looked different somehow. He stood there examining it until his eyes fell upon one of the figures, an owl nearly as tall as he was. Which immediately opened its eyes to peer down at him, freezing his blood. The thing is, I realized when he told me about this years later, I knew that bird. Remember the blog post about hanging out with the African Milky Eagle Owl at the zoo? That was her. She really was enormous, terrifyingly so, and one day she had decided to leave that aviary. In the same spot where I sat with her sometimes, she walked up to the wire, grasped it with one massive foot, and simply ripped it away from the steel girders to which it was bolted. She went walkabout, was briefly missing, was sighted in a few places (including that museum) and, as is normally the case with pair-bonded birds which have escaped a comfortable habitat, went back home again to the aviary. I was glad I could validate my husband’s memory for him: yes, that owl really was that big.

     The second event also involves natural history (which I suppose won’t surprise anyone reading this who actually knows me). We were schlumping around my grandparents’ house, where I’d eventually been lucky enough to grow up, enjoying my grandfather’s amazing, extensive library. Among the walls dedicated to books on the natural world, art, language, one-upmanship, stage magic, and the like was a large volume of undersea oddities which my husband began to leaf through, exclaiming suddenly over an entry.

     Now, it seems that one day in his early 20’s, so sometime in the 80’s before all the cable television shows we have now about weird and amazing living things, he’d been walking along the street on his way to work. Typical Southern California sunny concrete sidewalk, at least several blocks from the beach, cars going by, kids on skate(board)s, sun beating down, nothing out of the ordinary at all. And then he saw, lying on the sidewalk in front of him, a monster. This thing, he informed me, had been somewhat under a cubit in length, and was on its back. He was relieved to note that it appeared to be dead. Clearly plated on the dorsal side, like an armadillo, it sported a lobster-like tail of scales and flanges, was bright orange, and was covered in pair after pair after pair of jointed, craggy legs. It had a face, a scaly un-mammalian armored face with strange jaw parts, and outlandish, jointed antennae sprouted from its head. He’d been carrying a sense of disconnect ever since – what was that thing???

     Well, the book he was holding in my grandfather’s study answered that mystery although what it was doing there we never did figure out. A gull could have dropped it, sure, but given that it was a Giant Carnivorous Isopod, native to the deeper waters of a gulf nowhere near the sidewalk in question, where would a gull have got it? Our best guess is it came in accidentally on a long-range fishery ship and then a gull got hold of it somehow.

     Nature in all its splendor contains a great many things we aren’t prepared for. I don’t have a picture of a Giant Carnivorous Isopod to close this post with, but here, check out this tiny critter that appeared in my garden a couple of years ago, all next to me where I was reading: