Prodigal Me

A Plesiosaurus. She is into her murky brine, sunning her tail and hind flippers. "Just what's she thinking,anyway?" I wonder.

Today, under the big grey cumulus clouds, my brood & I are loading everything we own into a U-Haul truck and moving 135 miles south of here to my place of origin. We are doing this so as to try and save a little money for the Big Move To Iowa in July. Thus, today's trek amounts to Part One of a lengthy saga.

It is 6:25 a.m. I'm brewing coffee, the aromas of which are now filling this sleepy Death House with an optimistic vitality. Yes, we are tucked within the acorn. From this place of possibility, many great things can and will issue forth. But first, there is an arduous task or two. It's moving. It's breaking out. It's renouncing one home for another.

I was obsessed with Plesiosaurs when I was a kid. I had picture books on them that were dog-eared and ragged, and that I dragged wherever I went. (I was also into the Loch Ness monster and the strong possibility that Nessie was,in fact, a living, breathing aquatic anachronism.)

In one of his more startling phases as a parent, my father was convinced that dinosaurs, evolution, and plate tectonics didn't exist. My books on dinosaurs were lies, he told me. The way he saw it, God created the earth in seven days. End of story. I remember staring at one of my favorite Plesiosaurus tableaus after he told me this. In it, Plesiosaurus was surfacing in a vast, seething primordial sea. Volcanoes erupted in the background and bloodthirsty pteradactyls circled high above, in the still-developing atmosphere or early Earth. Next, I opened up my Children's Bible to the Garden of Eden and found an Aryan Adam & Eve meekly nibbling an apple, on some kind of a picnic with a king snake.

Parenting is hard. There are judgment calls to make that you never even considered making before you had kids, mainly because before you had kids, your life was secretly All About You in ways you weren't even aware of. Suddenly it's your job to protect your child in a world throttling towards total destruction and chaos. So you blow it from time to time. Big deal.

It's kind of a Southern tradition to "get religion" in big bursts of psychological turbulence. People are always "getting saved" and "witnessing" and "backsliding" and becoming "born again." There's just not a whole lot of equanimity in the South. That said, I don't hold it against my dad that he made me throw away my dinosaur books. Kids are smart. I knew that he had just hit some kind of religiosity rumble strip and was trying to do the right thing. I knew that, when my dad was a kid in Shiloh, Georgia, no one knew anything about dinosaurs. "What's this world coming to?" he must've thought, staring down at his son, brooding over this dark, violent oceanic scene.

I hated to see my books go, but it was all grist for the mill. My father came through that turbulence pretty good - as did I. Now, almost thirty years later, prodigal me returns.