25 August, 2002 - 15:28

It occured to me while i was in Vietnam that it would be amazing to be a gecko.

I was sitting with two women in a Buddhist macrobiotic restaurant in Saigon and there were geckos all over the walls. This is common in Vietnam - everything has geckos - walls, tables, the roofs, cars, sidewalks, etc. As we spoke the kind of conversation you might have with people whom you've just met, one silence led to a discussion about Vietnam folklore and how if a gecko cries four times, someone close to you will die. So we sat there for about an hour counting how many cries the geckos were making.

Never four. Three, quite often. Six, quite a lot. They kept us on pins and needles when they would leave a larger space in between cry numbers four and five.

So I was thinking how much fun it might be to live as the object of some culture's folk tales. I'm sure they do it on purpose, at least that's the impression I got from them. I'm even surer that their great, great, great, great gecko ancestors started this whole rumour for a bunch of gullible and animal-ignorant humans.