The T-Rex Buried in Your Backyard

When you’re a kid, you hear that you’re going to be an adult someday. But you don’t know it, not really. Because when you’re a kid, time stands still. Do you remember how long the space between Christmases used to be? That’s because time works differently for kids. They live in their own little eternity.

When I was a kid, I told everyone that I was going to be a paleontologist - someone who studies prehistoric life. It was the biggest word I knew, and I said it because I meant it. In a totally shocking and unusual case, I was a little boy obsessed with dinosaurs. I would watch BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs, and The Land Before Time on video cassette. Remember how you had to rewind those things every time you watched them?

So yes, I loved dinosaurs. Once my Pop bought me a little fossil-excavation kit, where you had to painstakingly chisel the bones of a T-Rex out of a piece of plaster with a tiny plastic pickaxe. Unsurprisingly, I got dust all over the house. But in the end, the T-Rex was excavated and put together, a victory that felt slightly underwhelming. The fun part was over and now I was just left with bones. I couldn’t articulate it then, but I wanted to still be digging.

The thing about dinosaurs is that they lived so long ago that it’s hard to visualise. Truly another epoch. How long ago is sixty-five million years? I know I can’t picture it. In my head, dinosaurs exist just over the horizon of history, in this vague land called The Past, along with ancient Egyptians and Ronald Reagan and Cartoon Network being entertaining. Now tell me: how long ago does your childhood seem? It’s a weird question, but if you’re anything like me it will feel a little like thinking about dinosaurs. Your childhood was long, eternal. And it still seems to exist, in some weird immaterial place just behind the present. It was an age ago, and yet it just happened. It never felt like it would end but then it did. Your childhood was yesterday and 65 million years ago, all at once.

And that’s what humans do. Either we’re caught up in some fascinating present excavation, or we’re facing the vast echoing future, or we’re wrapped up in the gauze of our past. We are often implored to live in the present, to relinquish our death grip on those halcyon memories, Chinese-whispered through time. Your childhood is gone, you might be told. But the present is still here, and it can be beautiful.

All fair enough, but what if your childhood isn’t gone? What if you still feel like that same kid, like you just blinked and missed something? Well, this is how we live: we reconstruct our lives, our identities, like pieces of bone. We sweep up the narratives of that long, long childhood, and the jarring place we now find ourselves, and we put it all together. Adulthood is sense-making, and nostalgia is a logical response to an eternal Now that somehow ended anyway. It isn’t a feeling to reject, or cherish, or feel guilty about. It just is, a token of the space you feel between yourself and that old, familiar place. To close that gap is to bring some piece of that old eternity into the present, to make yourself more whole and your life more real.

Like most things, my life changed and moved in ways I could never have foreseen as a child chipping away at rocks in the backyard. I didn’t end up becoming a paleontologist. But like myself at seven years old, I’m still digging up fossils.