Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

  “This practice runs wholly against the conventional wisdom of most twentieth-century educational, psychological and medical experts, who viewed homework as bad for young children’s health—mentally, emotionally, even physically—anytime before the third grade. It also runs up against the best scientific evidence available today about the impact of homework on school achievement: very positive effects in high school, marginally beneficial in middle school, but of least—if any—benefit in the early grades. So far, there’s no solid evidence that getting habituated to homework early does children good.”

  My mother eventually came to run a jewelry school. She has a gallery show once a year on the East Side of Manhattan. The sound of her hammering away in her studio in our house in Park Slope is one of the most evocative audio memories of my childhood. So when this question came along, I knew exactly where to go for the answer. Mom?

  “What do they do with the shavings?”

  —NANCY DILLON, age seven, San Carlos, California, after being given a gold ring that had been engraved

  Bessie Jamieson, owner of the Jewelry Arts Institute, New York City:

  “You save every little bit of shavings—we call them filings—and recycle them. You sell them back to a refiner. I take them to a person who refines gold on Forty-seventh Street, a guy named Lee, at Marco Polo. I take all my filings and pieces of scrap, have them melted down, assayed—that’s tested—and refined. He charges me to do that, but he gives me back the gold that’s in them. So if I take in ten ounces of filings, I might get six ounces of pure gold back. Also, I take in the sweep from the floor and from the desks, too, and they refine that. They melt it all down and throw away what isn’t gold, and whatever’s left is mine. Years ago—I don’t know if they still do it—shops that made jewelry that had wooden floors, they took up the floors and burned them to get the gold out of the wood.”

  9.

  Deanosaurus

  It started with a dog-eared picture book and a few plastic dinosaur figures Dean found in the back of the classroom. Who knows what he saw when he first gazed at those prehistoric beasts, and began to wrestle with the idea that they had once lived here, and now were gone, and that no human had ever seen them, and yet here were their pictures. Whatever it was, it sparked something deep within him.

  For Christmas, my sister sent Dean a whole selection of dinosaur figures. It included all the classics: Tyrannosaurus rex, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Ankylosaurus, Brontosaurus and a few more. Other dinosaur books and other figures followed, given by friends and family. There were pop-up books, and books with cutaway pages on clear plastic, and encyclopedias that listed every imaginable kind of beast, from every era, and were almost too heavy for a five-year-old to lift.

  Then came the DVDs, with realistic-looking carnivores chasing panicked herbivores over rocky terrain or through thickly wooded glades. Jurassic Park went into heavy rotation on the DVD player, the scary parts fast-forwarded or blocked, tiny hands over big brown eyes.

  The living room, no longer a traffic jam, became a prehistoric battleground. Dean set up the death matches around our feet. He was especially interested in various dinosaurs’ defenses, and their offensive characteristics—teeth, horns, claws, those visible tools that plunged into the necks of dinner, or drove deep into the soft bellies of attackers. He wanted to know how they worked, what all those fantastic instruments were designed to do. He focused on their visible tools, their systems, just as my friend Gia in New Brunswick had said little boys are apt to do.

  His interest had phases and subsets: first it was long necks, then Velociraptors, then Ankylosaurus and then Pachycephalosaurus. Never duckbills, for which he seemed to have a certain scorn, saying they looked silly and couldn’t defend themselves. Each subset had its own progression: he would learn about this dinosaur, what made it different, then he’d start drawing it, surprisingly well, in much the same way as Peter Bogdanovich described and organized all the movies he saw on index cards, taking possession of them at an early age. Dean developed impressive physical imitations of the stances he saw in books, and even created sounds to go with the images. It wasn’t clear where he came up with this; Helene and I wondered if dinosaur impersonations could lead to a career.

  One day when I was off work, I stopped by the schoolyard during recess, looking for my now kindergarten-age son amid the screaming hordes on the other side of the fence. I scanned the yard, starting at the edges. As I did, I became conscious of a secret fear, similar to those no doubt harbored by other parents: I began to worry that all the kids would be playing tag but Dean would be off in some distant corner, wailing like a Protoceratops.

  It had rained in the morning; boys and girls nonchalantly jumped wide puddles, their mirror images flicking across them. They seemed like a good group of kids, all clean and nicely dressed. There were no crap games unfolding in the schoolyard’s distant corners with dice-throwing six-year-olds cursing a blue streak, stubby unlit cigars sticking out of their mouths. This was encouraging. So I moved my eyes to the center, and there Dean was, running around with his cronies, laughing and screaming, no faux-prehistoric yelps or shrieks coming from his mouth. He broke free to come see me for a few moments, fingers gripping the chain-link fence, and then rejoined the mob.

  Those two boys in the local library who knew the planets? By now I had started to see in Dean what Helene had seen in them: a bottomless interest, a desire for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Not only was Dean’s speech improving every day—except for a brief period near the end of kindergarten when he developed what can only be described as a thick French accent—but he was drinking in information, keeping it and processing it.

  We read; he retained. He learned Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, and herbivore, carnivore and omnivore. I can only imagine that a young mother who bumped into Helene and him as they pored over dinosaur books in the library would have been alarmed at her own child’s progress, and run home demanding swift action. Dean’s birthday parties had a dinosaur theme: Helene painted a giant mural of dinosaurs and hung it across the bookcase—“HAPPY BIRTHDAY DINO”—and I was off to The Ice House, two years running, in search of dry ice for the volcano cake.

  And the questions multiplied.

  “Why do little kids love T-rex?” Dean asked me when he was five, thinking back to the days when he had been four.

  “I guess because he’s the biggest,” I said.

  “But he’s not,” Dean answered. “Spinosaurus is bigger, and Giganotosaurus, too.”

  “Maybe because he’s the scariest?”

  “But he’s not. Dilophosorus, the one with the neck that comes out, the one from Jurassic Park that spits poison? He’s scarier.”

  “Maybe it’s because he had those weird little arms with those nasty little fingers on them.”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Here he did his imitation—crouch-leaning forward, legs bent, fingers curled into hideous talons.

  I knew the answer because I’d had my own dinosaur phase. This was post-cranes, pre-ships, an interest that had faded, even been forgotten, until Dean rekindled it. I, too, had wrestled with the mind-blowing concept of our planet—including the land on which our city sat—being inhabited by a universe of animals that had long since died out, and had never been seen.

  Of course, a lot had changed with dinosaurs in the intervening thirty years. When I was little, there were about nine of them; now there were hundreds. Once slow, small-brained and hand-drawn, dinosaurs were now fantastically streamlined and agile, computer-generated, armed with giant single claws and all manner of spikes and spines, festooned with sails and crests and sprouting brightly colored plumage. Their systems had gone mad. They hunted in packs, moved like lightning, fought like demons. There were countless variations and subsets, all going by longer and longer and more unpronounceable names, many of them Chinese.

  I also discovered that the packaging in which dinosaur toys came had also undergone a transformation. Once tossed inside fl
imsy cardboard boxes with crinkly plastic windows for viewing, they were now lashed in place by translucent wires of titanium-like strength tied in unfathomable knots, anchored to black plastic bases with dozens of microscopic Phillips-head screws. It could take hours to free them.

  In the middle of Dean’s early dinosaur phase, my mother shocked Lindsay and me by selling the house in Park Slope. I’d liked the idea of having that house around, even if I didn’t live in it, even if a few bad memories hung around all that beautiful mahogany woodwork. The idea of it being sold to another family was somehow very painful. Still, I steadied my nerves and went over to help clear out the week before the closing, and that’s when I came across The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs.

  Torn at the corners from overuse, the cover showed a scowling Brontosaurus hip-deep in water on a soupy prehistoric day, with a T-rex dragging its tail along a distant shore, a Pterodactyl gliding by a giant palm tree and a volcano erupting above another wading Brontosaurus in the far distance. This had been my favorite book when I was Dean’s age.

  I stared at the cover. Sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor, books and photographs and college papers piled around me, I began to flip through the pages as my mother and sister yelled to each other through the glass-paneled doors—the sound traveling through the still-empty rectangle where the kicked pane once had been—deciding what should be tossed and what should be saved. The black-and-white drawings captured roughly a dozen smooth-skinned, lumbering dinosaurs in various stages of eating, foraging, fighting or being consumed, and prompted a surprisingly strong feeling of involuntary memory in me: they seemed so familiar, these pictures, even though it had been three decades since I’d seen them.

  The contours of a Triceratops impaling a rigidly upright T-rex seemed to fit into a missing spot in my psyche, like the last piece of a puzzle.

  The drawing of a long-necked Diplodocus—I pronounced it dip-lo-DOCK-us—invoked something even more unusual, an involuntary audio memory. As soon as I turned the page to it, the song “Summer Breeze” played in my head: Summer breeze, makes me feel fine…

  This strange association precisely dated my dinosaur phase to July or August 1972, when the song, by a band called Seals & Crofts, was a hit, propelled up the charts by its catchy if cheesy guitar part and stoned lyrics.

  It’s funny how a dinosaur and a riff will do that. One minute you’re a thirty-eight-year-old man in his old room looking through a book, wondering what to throw away, the debris of your childhood all around you, and the next you’re a little boy with a big head of hair, sun-bleached and sand-covered, sitting in the backseat of your family’s old Volkswagen station wagon, and the radio is playing. Your parents are up front, still together, impossibly young, your sister is next to you, impossibly younger, a book is in your lap and summer is outside the window.

  I took The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs back to show Dean what dinosaurs looked like when I was little. He saw the cover and got excited, but as he flipped through the pages, I detected a loss of enthusiasm; he seemed to be deflating. He kept coming up to me, the book opened in his hands, his finger pointing.

  “T-rex didn’t drag his tail like that.”

  “Brachiosaurus couldn’t breathe underwater.”

  “Allosaurus didn’t live at the same time as Triceratops. One was Jurassic, one was Cretaceous.”

  I flipped the page to the Diplodocus.

  “How about Diplodocus, is this right?” I asked him.

  He looked at me and said: “It’s dih-PLOD-uh-kuss.”

  Our default weekend destination had become the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhat tan. A castle of rough granite, towers and soaring columns on Central Park, it contains some of the greatest dinosaur fossil specimens ever unearthed. My mother took my sister and me here again and again when we were little, the dinosaur halls dark and almost dingy, unchanged for fifty years. But they underwent a redesign in the early 1990s to become as radically altered from my childhood as toy dinosaurs and toy-dinosaur packaging—sunlight pours in through Plexiglas walkways, ramps take you up to the Triceratops’ horns, skulls are there to be touched, knobs and buttons to be pushed and pushed again.

  The most striking display is the main hall: an Apatosaurus rears up on its hind legs to protect her young from a rampaging Allosaurus. The creature’s neck vertebrae, smaller and smaller, curl gracefully up to a tiny head just below the vaulted ceiling, as delicate and seemingly ephemeral as smoke.

  The first time Helene suggested we take Dean there, I felt my heart jump just a bit. We went once, and then again. We’d range around the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs and the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs, and then, Dean’s dinosaurian obsession temporarily slaked, through the various halls of mammals, which are exactly as they were when I was little: buffalo roaming across the plains; antelope grazing near the Nile, a smoky brush fire in the distance; a gorilla pounding his chest in a misty rain forest, all safely behind glass, as well as dead.

  The museum was never empty, and on rainy weekend days it was packed early, with bedraggled parents dragging platoons of soggy children from glistening SUVs with license plates from states near and far. On those days, the place was an exercise in frustration: the cafeteria packed with screaming, crying hordes, the crowds around the dinosaurs so thick that you could never get near the buttons or touch the skulls.

  Now that Dean was hooked on something, I decided to take full advantage of it. What better person to answer this new deluge of questions than the top dinosaur guy at the American Museum, the curator of dinosaur paleontology? His name is Mark Norell. I set up an interview. I figured he could field Dean’s queries while, at the same time, untangling some of mine. I wondered if his own childhood fascination with dinosaurs had brought him to this cathedral. Could Dean’s interest propel him through a lifetime?

  I took Dean out of school for half of the day. He’d be marked late, but I was confident that for this one morning at least he’d learn more with me than he would in his classroom.

  We met Norell in his office on the top floor of the pointed turret of the museum’s southeast corner. It’s circular, with giant windows looking out on Central Park and the high-rises of the East Side of Manhattan, which were hazy and backlit by the morning sun.

  “Do you live here?” Dean asked when we walked in.

  “Sometimes I feel like I do,” Norell said, getting up from behind his computer. He had longish, blond-gray hair, and looked a little like Steve Martin, the comedian. He was younger than I’d expected.

  He gave us a tour, past rows of wooden storage cabinets, behind the scenes, to the various “bone rooms” where specimens are kept. We saw a bone from a Camarasaurus, a relative of Diplodocus, held in a frame of blond wood and thick Styrofoam, and some of Norell’s recent finds from Mongolia: two fossils of Oviraptorosaurs, one still sitting on a nest of eggs, both of them still embedded in the crusty red rock-like sand of the Gobi desert.

  As we did, we chatted, and Norell said some surprising things.

  He had spent much of his career on microgenetics. His work in fossils had involved the study of mammals. “But when I was offered a job here,” he said, “the only condition was, they said, ‘If you come to work at the American Museum, will you work on dinosaurs?’”

  The only condition? Had being here in this cathedral of dinosaurs redirected his passion to prehistoric reptiles? At least a little bit? After twenty years in newspapers, I knew that being exposed to a topic, again and again, can make you fascinated by it. Otherwise, you could go insane.

  “No,” he said bluntly. “I’m not really that interested in dinosaurs. I’m more interested in science, whether we can actually figure some of this stuff out, if we are clever enough to do that as opposed to just knowing a lot about dinosaurs.”

  He didn’t stop there: “I’m not one of the people who sits around and thinks about dinosaurs, how they were and how they acted. To me they are data sets. They are pretty
much identical to thinking about the DNA sequence of corn, of maize, which I did when I was working on regulatory genes. To me it’s just about the questions.”

  Dean looked at him blankly. I guess I did, too. Corn? This field trip was not going as I had expected. The head of dinosaur paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History “not really that interested in dinosaurs”?

  I asked him about the Apatosaurus and the Allosaurus in the entrance hall. Could she really have stood up on her hind legs like that?

  “We can’t say definitively yes or no,” he said. “At the time we did it, it was judged to be sort of ‘out there.’ But less so, I think, now. There has been a lot of biomechanics work where people have actually been able to look at the range of motion, what was possible, and even though you can’t test it directly, a lot of the people who work in biomechanics think that it was possible.”

  As he spoke, Norell opened sliding shelves containing every imaginable shape of fossil, hip bones, pelvises, vertebrae of every size.

  “Is this early Cretaceous?” Dean asked about an Ankeceratops skull.

  “No, late Cretaceous,” Norell said dryly.

  He left us after the second bone room. It was 10:00 on a Monday morning. I knew I was supposed to get Dean back to school, but I couldn’t resist: here we were, in the cathedral of dinosaurs, all by ourselves.

  We had the run of the place, unencumbered by crowds. The sunlight came down in slants from the big windows, and we moved in and out of the shafts. I stopped by a painting I remembered from my childhood—of flying dinosaurs high atop a cliff by the ocean at sunset—and Dean yelled to me from across the room. He was standing at the Pachycephalosaurus skull that you are allowed to touch, and that is usually mobbed. I nearly shushed him, but then realized that we were the only creatures within earshot who were not hundred-million-year-old fossils. I went over to him. It was the first time I got to touch that skull.