After my visit with Simon this week, I began thinking about something I had written about him that went into my thesis. It is part of another piece I came up with at the Red River Valley Writing Project in '07. Simon figures in toward the end of this piece.
Sorry if you've read these pieces before.
It takes a special person to not only teach a five year old to fathom earth’s entire history but to also realize our place as a minute speck on it. But that was exactly what my grandmother did one day in late June.
“Okay,” Granny said from the other side of her cramped apartment at Fairview Manor. “Just tape the end of the paper to the back door.”
I pressed my thumb to the green metal door at the back of her kitchen. The slice of Scotch tape held firm - two feet below the peep and just a little to the left of the imposing deadbolt lock.
“Now come to the front door,” Granny called from the living room.
I followed the roll of old white calculator tape as it snaked its way out of the kitchen, over the dining room table where it nearly snagged in the fake bowl of plastic fruit in the middle, around the green leather recliner, and finally past the TV.
Granny stood at the front door. She had spent the past few minutes drawing and writing on the roll of paper before propping the pencil behind an ear. She held the dwindling roll of paper in one hand and a single strip of tape in the other. Then - wincing just a bit from her arthritis - she gripped the paper with her swollen hands and with a sharp yank from her bulging knuckle, she tore the paper free from the roll, which she tucked into her front pocket. Then she applied the Scotch tape, adhering the other end to the front door.
“Now this will help us view earth’s history in perspective. The piece you stuck to the back door is the beginning of earth. The piece I stuck to the front door is present day,” she instructed.
I turned and looked at the tape as it stretched back over the TV, by the recliner, past the fake bowl of fruit, and around the corner into the kitchen where it disappeared.
“Now let’s walk back and check the marks,” she said.
I found myself looking closer at the tape. Sure enough there were pencil marks several feet apart on the paper.
“These, my dear,” Granny said in the tone that meant she was teaching me something important, “are the eras in earth’s history.”
Then she stopped at the dinning room table and pulled out a chair. She bent down to my perspective and said, “Look at the beginning of the things.”
I did.
“As you can see,” Granny said from beside me, “the longest period in earth’s history, the Precambrian period, lasts all the way from the back door to the dining table here. That was the period the earth was cooling and preparing for life. Imagine each foot of tape is - oh - a thousand million years.”
“But most of the tape is taken up by it!”
“Yes. It roughly makes up about 90 percent of earth’s history. Just think of how long it took for the most basic forms of life to begin.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. So much white tape where there was no life on earth at all. It certainly put my measly five years on it in perspective.
Granny noticed my awe. She gave it a few seconds to sink in. Then she spoke in my ear. “That is why I think God created life on earth.”
I turned to look at her.
“It must have been so terribly lonely for so incredibly long.“
That certainly made sense to me.
“Now, come here with me,” she said close to my ear, and moved from the table and inched our way along the tape, leaving that stretch of 10 or 12 feet of empty time behind us.
“Things began to change,” she said as I looked at the strange words scrawled onto the tape. “More complex forms of life began to flourish. The Precambrian era ended and the Paleozoic began. At this point it is believed that all of the continents were joined into one large landmass. It was at this point that the dinosaurs – your favorites – began to arise.”
We then ventured a little farther, stopping in front of the TV. “Here is your favorite period, The Jurassic Period.”
From all the hours Granny spent reading me articles from the National Geographics and buying me a small horde of plastic dinosaurs, I knew she was right. I looked on top of the TV and saw that she had placed my favorites - T-Rex and Stegosaurus - on top next to the word “Jurassic.”
“See how long this period lasted?”
I nodded as I saw the more recent eras blocked off into shorter periods that only measured a few inches. Things were getting interesting now.
“During the Cretaceous period, the dinosaurs began to die out.”
I followed the tape over the TV and the bookshelf, where several dinosaurs were tipped over. I nodded as I realized I was seeing the downfall of the dinosaurs.
“But it seems like the dinosaurs lived so long ago,” I said, eyeing the tape as it was quickly running out, for the front door was just a few inches away. “We’re almost at the end!”
Granny cracked a broad smile.
“Okay, stand here at the front door,” she said steering me toward it. “This marks the most current era in earth’s history where the earth cooled because of the Ice Age and homo sapiens came into the picture.”
“But you don’t have anything written down for them . . . I mean us!”
“Just wait,” she said. “First, from our place in the present, look back at all of earth’s history.”
I followed the tape from the door over the bookshelf and to the TV. So much for the dinosaurs.
Then I watched as it wound toward the dining room table. The Paleozoic era.
Finally, I saw how the majority of the tape belonged to the blank – and mostly lifeless -- Precambrian era. Indeed, how lonely it must have been for all those years.
“So where are we?” I asked, turning back to the front door and peering at the tape.
Granny gave me her I-am-glad-you-asked-me-that smile and snatched the pencil out from behind her ear.
“We my dear,” she said with the pencil poised, ”are right here.”
With a flick of her wrist, she snapped the thinnest of lines across the very edge of the tape. It was so slight that I had to look close to even see it.
“That’s it?”
“Yep. There’s not even enough room to write homo sapiens.”
I stared at the line.
“So whenever we like to think we humans are so high and mighty,” she said grinning and propping the pencil back behind her ear, “just remember our little lesson here.”
Then just a few weeks later I had another mystery solved as I sat securely in my grandmother’s lap, my knees tucked under my chin. Granny’s chin was tucked into my right shoulder while her spindly arms stretched around me. I peered at the National Geographic she held before me and hung on every word she read from the article and captions.
In two days my sixth grade class would be visiting Manitoba’s Museum of Man and Nature. In the meantime, I had been talking nonstop about seeing the dinosaurs. To ease my suspense, Granny fished through her towering stack of National Geographics, which she had subscribed to for years (and she must have paid for well in advance since I continued to get them for a full two years after her death). Finally she located an issue devoted to a new fossil dig in South Dakota.
I stopped Granny at a double page spread of a stegosaurus that was recently completed and put on display at a museum (alas Granny informed me that it was not the Winnipeg Museum). I peered at the massive skeleton hulking in the room. As I looked closer, I saw a shaft of light streaming down from a high window. It fell across the dinosaur's back and rib cage, eventually landing on the paleontologists and museum director standing by a hind leg.
Granny told me how some scientists, called paleontologists, spent months unearthing the fossil inch-by-inch using toothbrush like instruments. I peered at her in disbelief. When I gazed back at the stegosaurus straddling the glossy pages, I began to see all of the different bones fused together to form the reconstructed monster. I even picked out several large iron rods running through the beast, helping hold the massive bones in place. The more I studied it, the more individual bones I saw as if it were a skeletal jigsaw puzzle.
“It must have taken them forever to dig this dinosaur up,” I said, thinking aloud about the men who looked tiny beside the stegosaurs.
“Oh dear, those bones never stood together in real life,” Granny replied.
It was the most startling thing she ever said. So startling in fact, that I still remember the words 25 years later.
Granny explained how only a fraction of dinosaur bones ended up as fossils. An even smaller fraction of those had been discovered. Sure scientists often found complete fossils of small prehistoric animals. They even found skeletons of early humans. But dinosaurs were huge creatures, she nodded her head toward the stegosaurs in the article below, so it was nearly impossible for an entire fossilized skeleton to be found, especially when most dinosaurs often met rather grizzly fates - devoured by a T-Rex, caught in a volcanic flow, swallowed by a tar pit. As a result, she explained, there was often little left, except for bits and pieces. A skull in South Dakota, a backbone in Colorado, a few ribs in Mexico.
“Then they’re liars,” I said feeling betrayed by those little men beneath their fake construction.
“Not at all,” Granny said. Not only were they working to piece together a creature that lived millions of years ago, she explained, but they were also dealing with hundreds - if not thousands - of individual bones at a time. Some bones were probably chewed by predators or worn away from the elements. So it really was incredible that scientists were even able to accurately reconstruct any of the dinosaurs.
When I scoffed that it wouldn’t be that hard, Granny snapped that I was not one to criticize anyone when I could barely keep track of my Star Wars action figures’ weapons.
Maybe she had a point after all.
“So how did they get this dinosaur together?” I asked.
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” Granny replied. She read a caption in the lower left hand corner. The stegosaurus was a collection of half a dozen different digs from around the world. But after years of work, it was now complete and ready for display.
“Well, that doesn’t seem very fair,” I finally said.
“It’s not a question of fairness,” Granny said suppressing a giggle. “It’s a question of science. They want to give the most accurate representation possible.”
I thought that over.
“Plus,” Granny added, “would you rather see this dinosaur in various pieces around the room - a skull or tooth here, a thigh or a horn there. Or would you rather stand next to this,” she added tapping the swollen joint of her index finger against the double page spread, “and feel what it would have been like to have a stegosaurus stride past you.”
I looked back at the stegosaurus for a long time, imagining the different stegosauruses and their various fates. Finally, I let the bones merge into this stegosaurus again and its one final fate.
“Just think what would have happened had a T-Rex stumbled across this guy in a dark alley,” Granny said after awhile. “Okay, a dark part of the jungle then,” she added with a chuckle, and she was off spinning a tale. With her words, the bones disappeared beneath blood, muscle, and flesh, beneath a coat of armored spikes beneath a scorching Jurassic sun.
Granny’s lesson on fossil reconstruction came in handy that weekend at Manitoba’s Museum of Man and Nature. While they didn’t have any impressive T-Rex or Stegosaur skeletons, they did have one large skeleton of a prehistoric bear.
When our guide finally led us to the exhibit, I was able to cop Granny’s explanation, passing it off as my own. Our guide’s jaw nearly hit the floor when I explained to my fellow cub scouts how people often thought fossilized skeletons were actually one single dinosaur instead of bits and pieces of many collected from various digs around the country.
Most nodded, including our guide, as they accepted my theory. My chest swelled with this newfound attention. Usually, I was the kid in back on field trips, just trying to keep up. But Simon Geller, a friend of mine who usually had all of his theories readily accepted, piped up his dissension.
He further challenged my theory by stating he believed this bear had actually been discovered whole.
“Right, Simon,” I said. “How long ago did this thing die? Like a million years ago. And you’re telling me that the paleontologists were able to find every single little bone on this guy,” I said cocking my head toward the skeleton below us just as Granny had cocked her head down at the stegosaurus in the National Geographic.
“Yes,” Simon replied crossing his arms over his yellow tie and impressive collection of badges.
“Well, uh, actually,” the guide said once his jaw was back where it belonged, “you’re uh, quite right . . .” he said glancing at my name tag, “This skeleton is comprised of bones taken from three separate digs in Manitoba and one in Alberta,” he added as he read the plaque on the display.
“Told you so,” I said to Simon, crossing my arms over my yellow tie and smirking so wildly that it made up for my two measly badges.
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