Travels with Iggy

Fifth grade was a great year. Boys were finally cootie-free, girls had discovered deodorant, and we were all content with our quirky individual selves now that we were at the top of the elementary school totem pole. Our paradise resembled a scene out of The Magic School Bus books, complete with a frizzy-haired, rainbow-skirted teacher and a mismatched collection of bastardized animals cohabitating in a tropical rain forest.

We had a choice selection of creatures, including Snyder the skink, Roadkill the gecko, Birdie the cockatiel, and three newts recovered from Adam's basement. All the glue we ate must have gone to our heads, because we fought over the honor of being a "pet parent" and cleaning up the gifts that decorated their cages. Although there was always fun to be had coaxing Birdie down from a light fixture or extricating Snyder from someone's hair, our true allegiance lay with Iggy the iguana. Rescued from the treacherous exotic animal black market that raged in Indiana, Iggy was something of a mess when our teacher found him, as he had picked up strange illnesses during his travels. Fortunately, Iggy recovered to own us all, with only a slight limp as a souvenir from his travels.

We started each day making geography cards, learning that there were 48 contiguous states, and that Greenland is not as green as you would think. Just to spite the rest of us, whoever was in charge of pet parenting that week would let Iggy scamper around her desk while trying to convince us that her fortune-cookie Chinese was as good as the real thing. Iggy would shake his head at this nonsense as our attention turned back to locating Transylvania on a map only to discover that it's nowhere near Pennsylvania. Of course, this was no news to Iggy, who probably spent a summer of his youth there. When he gazed fondly at the country next to Austria, we'd get the impression that the spot was something beyond a question in next week's quiz.

Skipping down to art class mid-morning, we vacationed in a nation festooned with watercolor paintings from the land of elementary school kids. Iggy, ever ready for a new experience, was smuggled into class and frolicked between lopsided coil pots and tempera paint. The open-minded iguana was as at home in a game of paper football as he was on Dominic's pudgy shoulder. In addition to Iggy's remarkable bladder control, for which Dominic was very grateful, Iggy was always willing to accompany us on adventures planning coordinated attacks against substitutes or on spy missions on the class across the hall. He would instigate excursions into the boys' line on the way to class, or scurry along the hot-lunch line when the principal was away, allowing kids to give him a belly rub in exchange for nacho-cheese combos. Although these places were as foreign to him as Madagascar was to us, he never stopped traveling. The colored bits on maps represented more than misinformed ideas. They were nations teeming with reptilian friends as disparate as students in our classroom.

In the afternoon, we were confined to our desks and bribed with shiny gold stars to overcome our fear of fractions, leaving Iggy to his own designs. He wandered about freely, scavenging the remains of lunch boxes while avoiding the confines of his cage. We would watch our step—a lesson we learned quickly after seeing what became of Sam's toad—and Iggy reported to us later. To Iggy, the classroom wasn't merely a classroom, but a sum of its diverse parts: the windowsill offered a perch from which to mock the squirrels, the cabinet provided a dark place for a nap. All tiles, tables, students, and teachers had significance beyond their basic existence and location.

The education of Iggy the iguana was more real than our own. Our flashcards and colored maps tried to teach us what Iggy learned for himself. He learned the coat hall was to the left of his cage; we learned Sri Lanka was south...