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.
Young Frankincense
My most vivid childhood memory of Christmas that does not involve opening presents, putting batteries in presents, playing with presents, and destroying presents before sundown, is the annual Nativity Pageant at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Armonk, New York. This was a major tradition at St. Stephen’s, which had quite a few of them. For example, at Easter, we had the Hoisting of the Potted Hyacinths. Each person in the congregation was issued a potted hyacinth, and we’d sing a song that had a lot of “alleluias” in it, and every time we’d get to one, we’d all hoist our pots over our heads. This is the truth. Remember it next time somebody tells you Episcopalians never really get loose.
But the big event was the Nativity Pageant, which almost all the Sunday School kids were drafted to perform in. Mrs. Elson, who had experience in the Legitimate Theater, was the director, and she would tell you what role you would play, based on your artistic abilities. Like, if your artistic abilities were that you were short, you would get a role as an angel, which involved being part of the Heavenly Host and gazing with adoration upon the Christ Child and trying not to scratch yourself. The Christ Child was played by one of those dolls that close their eyes when you lay them down because they have weights in their heads. I know this because Neil Thompson and I once conducted a research experiment wherein we scientifically opened a doll’s head up with a hammer. (This was not the doll that played the Christ Child, of course. We used a doll that belonged to Neil’s sister, Penny, who once tied her dog to the bumper of my mother’s car roughly five minutes before my mother drove the car to White Plains. But that is another story.)
Above your angels, you had your three shepherds. Shepherd was my favorite role, because you got to carry a stick, plus you spent most of the pageant waiting back in the closet with a rope that led up to the church bell and about 750,000 bats. Many were the happy rehearsal hours we shepherds spent back there, in the dark, whacking each other with sticks and climbing up the ladder so as to cause bat emission products to rain down upon us. (“And lo, when the shepherds did looketh towards the heavens, they did see, raining down upon them, a multitude of guano ...)
When it was our turn to go out and perform, we shepherds would emerge from the closet, walk up the aisle, and hold a conference to determine whether or not we should go to Bethlehem. One year when I was a shepherd, the role of First Shepherd was played by Mike Craig, who always, at every rehearsal, would whisper: “Let’s ditch this joint.” Of course this does not strike you as particularly funny, but believe me, if you were a 10-year-old who had spent the past hour in a bat-infested closet, it would strike you as amusing in the extreme, and it got funnier every time, so that when Mike said it on Christmas Eve during the actual Pageant, it was an awesome thing, the hydrogen bomb of jokes, causing the shepherds to almost pee their garments as they staggered off, snorting, toward Bethlehem.
After a couple of years as shepherd, you usually did a stint as a Three King. This was not nearly as good a role, because (a) you didn’t get to wait in the closet, and (b) you had to lug around the gold, the frankincense, and of course the myrrh, which God forbid you should drop because they were played by valuable antique containers belonging to Mrs. Elson. Nevertheless, being a Three King was better than being Joseph, because Joseph had to hang around with Mary, who was played by (YECCCCCHHHHHHH) a girl. You had to wait backstage with this girl, and walk in with this girl, and needless to say you felt like a total wonk, which was not helped by the fact that the shepherds and the Three Kings were constantly suggesting that you liked this girl. So during the pageant joseph tended to maintain the maximum allowable distance from Mary, as though she were carrying some kind of fatal bacteria.