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A Boy And His Diplodocus

We have been deeply into dinosaurs for some time now. We have a great many plastic dinosaurs around the house. Sometimes I think we have more plastic dinosaurs than plastic robots, if you can imagine.

This is my son’s doing, of course. Robert got into dinosaurs when he was about three, as many children do. It’s a power thing: Children like the idea of creatures that were much, much bigger and stronger than mommies and daddies are. If a little boy is doing something bad, such as deliberately pouring his apple juice onto the television remote-control device, a mommy or daddy can simply snatch the little boy up and carry him, helpless, to his room. But they would not dare try this with Tyrannosaurus Rex. No sir. Tyrannosaurus Rex would glance down at Mommy or Daddy from a height of 40 feet and casually flick his tail sideways, and Mommy or Daddy would sail directly through the wall, leaving comical cartoon-style Mommy-or-Daddy-shaped holes and Tyrannosaurus Rex would calmly go back to pouring his apple juice onto the remote-control device.

So Robert spends a lot of time being a dinosaur. I recall the time we were at the beach and he was being a Gorgosaurus, which, like Tyrannosaurus Rex, is a major dinosaur, a big meat-eater (Robert is almost always carnivorous). He was stomping around in the sand and along came an elderly tourist couple, talking in German. They sat down near us.

Robert watched them. “Tell them I’m a Gorgosaurus,” he said.

“You tell them,” I said.

“Gorgosauruses can’t talk,” Robert pointed out, rolling his eyes. Sometimes he can’t believe what an idiot his father is.

Anybody who has ever had a small child knows what happened next. What happened was Robert, using the powerful whining ability that Mother Nature gives to young children to compensate for the fact that they have no other useful skills, got me to go over to this elderly foreign couple I had never seen before, point to my son, who was looking as awesome and terrifying as a three-year-old can look lumbering around in a bathing suit with a little red anchor sewn on the crotch, and say: “He’s a Gorgosaurus.”

The Germans looked at me the way you would look at a person you saw walking through a shopping mall with a vacant stare and a chain saw. They said nothing.

“Ha ha!” I added, so they would see I was in fact very normal.

They continued to say nothing. You could tell this had never happened to them over in Germany. You could just tell that in Germany, they have a strict policy whereby people who claim their sons are dinosaurs on public beaches are quickly sedated by the authorities. You could also tell that this couple agreed with that policy.

“Tell them I’m a meat-eater,” the Gorgosaurus whispered.

“He’s a meat-eater,” I told the couple. God only knows why. They got up and started to fold their towels.

“Tell them I can eat more in ONE BITE than a mommy and a daddy and a little boy could eat in TWO WHOLE MONTHS,” urged the Gorgosaurus, this being one of the many dinosaur facts he got from the books we read to him at bedtime. But by then the Germans were already striding off, glancing back at me and talking quietly to each other about which way they would run if I came after them.

“Ha ha!” I called after them, reassuringly.

Gorgosaurus continued to stomp around, knocking over whole cities. I had a hell of a time getting him to take a nap that day.

Sometimes when he’s tired and wants to be cuddled, Robert is a gentle plant-eating dinosaur. I’ll come into the living room, and there will be this lump on my wife’s lap, whimpering, with Robert’s blanket over it.

“What’s that?” I ask my wife.

“A baby Diplodocus,” she answers. (Diplodocus looked sort of like Brontosaurus, only sleeker and cuter.) “it lost its mommy and daddy.”

“No!” I say.

“So it’s going to live with us forever and ever,” she says.

“Great!” I say,

The blanket wriggles with joy.

Lately, at our house we have become interested in what finally happened to the dinosaurs. According to our bedtime books, all the dinosaurs died quite suddenly about 60 million years ago, and nobody knows why. Some scientists—this is the truth, it was in Time magazine—think the cause was a Death Comet that visits the earth from time to time. Robert thinks this is great. A Death Comet! That is serious power. A Death Comet would never have to brush its teeth. A Death Comet could have pizza whenever it wanted.

Me, I get uneasy, reading about the Death Comet. I don’t like to think about the dinosaurs disappearing. Yet another reminder that nothing lasts forever. Even a baby Diplodocus has to grow up sometime.