I was not quite six years old. I didn't have much of a vocabulary, and found TV shows other than cartoons utterly boring. But my tiny, everyday world was filled with mind-stretching mysteries. What would it be like to have an older sister? Where did dreams come from? Could somebody start at 1 and actually count as high as 100,000?
My reading about dinosaurs begged more questions, of course, about what it would be like to be twenty times the size of an elephant, and about the experience of time: Those millions of years since the mighty creatures walked the earth stirred my imagination. Even the lifetimes of my parents (aged 29 and 36) seemed impossibly long, and I tried to envision being able to look back on so vast a stretch of time. The really captivating thing was that I had a mind and memory of my own, and could experience of time passing, and so had direct access to the glimmer of a hint of the answers to some of my questions.
And so, one summer morning, I decided to run my own private experiment. I came up with it as I was putting on my sandals (made from recycled tires, with real tire treads on the soles), on the shaggy blue carpet in the bedroom I shared with my brother, before running outside to play with friends. The experiment was to try to remember that moment for as long as I could: across the months and years, even as I grew older, even older than my parents were then. It's possible I hoped that by doing so I would hold on to a piece of the little boy who thought about time and dinosaurs, so that I would never fully experience whatever awful transition seemed to have drained most adults of their passion for such things.
The month was August; the year, 1973. The memory persists. The experiment continues.
My reading about dinosaurs begged more questions, of course, about what it would be like to be twenty times the size of an elephant, and about the experience of time: Those millions of years since the mighty creatures walked the earth stirred my imagination. Even the lifetimes of my parents (aged 29 and 36) seemed impossibly long, and I tried to envision being able to look back on so vast a stretch of time. The really captivating thing was that I had a mind and memory of my own, and could experience of time passing, and so had direct access to the glimmer of a hint of the answers to some of my questions.
And so, one summer morning, I decided to run my own private experiment. I came up with it as I was putting on my sandals (made from recycled tires, with real tire treads on the soles), on the shaggy blue carpet in the bedroom I shared with my brother, before running outside to play with friends. The experiment was to try to remember that moment for as long as I could: across the months and years, even as I grew older, even older than my parents were then. It's possible I hoped that by doing so I would hold on to a piece of the little boy who thought about time and dinosaurs, so that I would never fully experience whatever awful transition seemed to have drained most adults of their passion for such things.
The month was August; the year, 1973. The memory persists. The experiment continues.
