FOUND OUR SPOT

Yesterday, I saw a larger-than-life metal sculpture of a zebra outside French Connections and thought it would be the perfect lawn ornament for our new home in Moncure. Today, Bob and I went back and bought it.

Zebras have long been a theme in our life together. Years ago, we dreamed up “Savannaland,” a comic strip featuring a zebra named Spot. It was The Far Side and Dilbert meet Disneyland; a fake world mimicking reality.

Spot, the main character, was inspired by a photograph I’d clipped from an old National Geographic.

In Savannaland, the animals clocked in every day in an underground tunnel. Their job was to provide a Safari-like experience for human tourists who were carted around in Land Rovers just out of sight of the inner workings of the theme park.

Spot would be an operations guy working alongside makeup artists, cafeteria workers, and actors to create a lifelike Savanna.

We’ve also decided to start a Spot Album. Here’s the idea: the first time anyone comes to our new house, we’ll take a Polaroid of them with our new yard art and paste it in an album.

We’d gotten the idea for a Spot Album from our stint as lodge managers on Little Corn Island, where it was customary to pose departing guests behind the lodge with a view of the beach, take a Polaroid, and paste it in a guest book. People enjoyed looking through the albums at pictures of others who had stayed there over the years.

And then there’s the zebra picture. For as long as we’ve been together, we’ve hung a painting of two galloping zebras on the wall inside our back door. In the picture, the zebras are running away as fast as they can. They hang by the door to remind us not to hesitate when it’s time to leave.

It’s hard to say where we’ll hang our zebra picture after we move into this house because we suspect this will be our last move. For one thing, we’ve grown very attached to the people in our new neighborhood. We work together, eat together, and play together. For another, we’re in our fifties now, and this will be our fourteenth move since we got together seventeen years ago. In fact, I can remember more than forty homes, going back to when I was two.

We’re going to name our new yard art “Spot” and put him out to graze in the front yard near the pampas grass. He isn’t pretending or running like those other zebras in our life. He stands head up, with all four feet firmly rooted on the ground. This zebra stops here, proof that we’ve finally found our perfect spot.