on surprises

I.
The island is full of lizards, I pointed out this morning, as one skittered ahead of us on the sandy path down to the beach.  They are like the squirrels of the Caribbean, but more of a surprise, because they so often blend in with their surroundings: you don't see them so much as notice their frantic movement, and by then they are likely to be gone.  When we lived in India, a lizard lived in our apartment - which I did not mind; he inhabited a bathroom next to the study, and I would only sometimes see him, like the neighbor at whom you nod in your New York stairwell.  (When the movers came to take away the furniture, it turned out that he'd been leaving slender lizard turds all behind the vase in the corner.)


While I write here on the deck, a delicate grey lizard surveys me.  He is only the length of my palm from nose to tail.  Sometimes his jaws jerkily chew the air; sometimes he raises and lowers the front of his body as though doing pushups.  He hops, stops, considers.  Lizards are cautious little reptiles, as I think they have to be, given their size.  There are no good surprises for things so small.  In motion or in stillness, they are ever alert.

II.
I have decided that the most important quality to have, following and correlating to resiliency, is a sense of gratitude.  Some people are quite good at gratitude - my grandfather, for example, was content with a cup of coffee and the car keys.  Throw in some rice pudding, time with his family, and a DVD of The Honeymooners, and the man was in heaven.  His appreciation for things was earnest and easy: meals were always "out of this world" (the last word pronounced woild in an accent, Early Twentieth Century Bronx, that almost doesn't exist anymore).

My sense of appreciation is not so practiced.  I am liable to measure the distance between my dreams and plodding reality, and, worse still, to imagine the gap even before it exists.  "The Buddhists say, 'Expectation is the birth of misery,'" a man told me last spring; and in truth, I am always dreading some disruption to my plans.

We have been sizing up all the other guests, and clucking at the children who, assured since birth of their own juvenile importance, so casually order about their nannies.  We determined today that the tanned, vaguely dangerous-seeming people sitting around one table were "trustafarians" - people who do not work, because they do not need to work, who move from one beach and one party to another, just as they chain-smoke cigarettes.  We have been walking around pinching ourselves for days, verbalizing every instance of perfection that we find - and there are many; but, I realized with a sense of horror, had you never worked, you might never appreciate this perfection, it would be ... "Boring," said.   

In any case, I have been trying to think in opposition to my own nature, to remind myself how unlikely and how infused with good surprises is my fortune right now.  I am trying to name it, all of it: the thick sound of trees in the wind, which noticed at dinner the other night; the luxury of sitting outside with the sun on my face; the pleasure of lit candles against the night sky; the unnameable Pantone colors of the sea, dappled and darkened, and, in places, as saturated as a liquid jewel.

III.
This island is deceptively green, but there is no source of fresh water, apart from rain barrels and plastic bottles, and as I stared out the car window on the way from the airport, I thought two things: 1) This is going to be the nicest place I have ever been, and 2) Those poor, benighted settlers of many centuries ago.  It only looks lush: in fact, the most expensive sandy beach that money can buy has been overlaid upon the hard reality of rock.  The soil is poor and dry, good for nothing but condominiums and time-shares and hotels.  Only because of a three-hour plan ride for sun-starved New Yorkers can this place be classified as paradise.  But as we walked along the beach this afternoon in bleached light, our skin turning a warning shade of pink, I realized that this illusion of fertile soil and luxuriant growth is because every plant we see has, gloriously, found a way to exist in an inhospitable environment, to thrive in the sand and salt, to make do.

On my way home along the path in late afternoon, as my back prickled in the sunshine, I noticed a cactus sticking up abruptly in the jungle.   It seems so forgiving and soft and green, this jungle, I thought, - but that would be a sharp and unpleasant surprise, something you would not see coming if you were not attuned to arid reality.

But then these past months have been a series of surprises for me, some devastating, some quite positive, some simply far beyond plans or expectations, in the realm of unguarded daydreams.  I could have predicted none of this.  I consider my expectations, my hopes and nightmares, and I think of the hidden cactus, waiting in the jungle; but I think, too, of the flowers thriving in the thorns.