Hudson and Legos

"I like them because you don't have to worry about the laws of physics or science or anything."
-Hudson

For a whole summer Hudson and I sat at the coffee table in our living room and built Lego houses with expansive floor plans on green tile, because we didn't know how second stories worked. When he was little, before he knew how to put the pieces together, I assembled the sets Santa or the Easter Bunny brought him, not really caring what the final product looked like. I liked following step-by-step instructions. I was a surrogate worker for Anglerfish, dump trucks, Deathstars, a zoo. He reached a certain age where fine motor skills and concentration kicked in, and he didn't need me anymore.

Even now the instructions are irrelevant to him, and he has become the sole architect. I just get to watch. He builds me a house of pieces left over from what looks like a monster truck. I live in a small green and red roofless house where the kitchen and bathroom share a faucet, and the bedroom has glass walls that used to be truck windows. My sofa is made out of old tires. It is a sparsely furnished house. In the layout though, I see remnants of our own house, the real house which we are living now, and this gives me a sense of security. This is where Hudson has grown up, this is where he gets his ideas, where he creates.

For Christmas, Hudson received a Lego Star Wars Trade Federation Multi Troop Transport. It was 1,000 pieces, looked like a giant brown slug, and I wanted nothing more than to put it all together. It didn't really matter what I was building, just looking at the end product, feeling some sense of accomplishment is what I get out of piecing together tiny Legos. As Hudson pieced it together, I sat back and watched for a little while, like I was supposed to, but then as Hudson lost stamina/interest, he let me take over and finish the contraption, running back and forth to the kitchen to get more peppermint bark for us to share. We watched Food Network. It was just like our old agreement—I put it together, he gets the end product. I feel protective of this agreement, because I feel a reliance on me, but then I think of my monster truck house and I don’t think the alternative is all that bad.

Hudson and Dinosaurs

“According to the history, the crocodile is the closest living relative to the dinosaurs.”

-Hudson

At the age of eleven I had one fear. I was afraid of the disease where your muscles, connective tissues, and ligaments ossify, encasing your body in an exoskeleton of collagen. I was afraid of turning into Harry Eastlack, the stone man, who looked like spiders had woven webs of bone inside him. I didn't want my skeleton memorialized in a laboratory with scientists trying to find their way inside my impenetrable bone shell. While it only affects one out of every two million people, and I shouldn't have feared it, it’s like hemophilia in your bones. Once they started growing everywhere, they don't stop.

From the age of three to about nine, Hudson’s life revolved around dinosaurs. Specifically dinosaur documentaries, which we had an entire collection of, each video covering an era of dinosaur existence. They were called Walking with Dinosaurs. Road trips were timed in how many eras of dinosaurs we could get through. The drive from South Carolina to our grandparents house in North Carolina took us from the Triassic through the middle of the Cretaceous, while trips to New York to see our aunt took us all the way to the Mesozoic, which ends with the explosive extinction of the dinosaurs. The years that followed Walking with Dinosaurs were riddled with trips to the Museum of Natural History in New York, Jurassic Park on Ice (much like Disney Princesses on Ice, but with dinosaurs), dinosaur themed birthday parties and Halloween costumes. The only books he would read had to have some sort of dinosaur on the cover.

For Hudson’s fifth birthday, he received one of those Excavate Your Own Dinosaur Kits where polyresin dinosaur parts are sealed in gypsum sand and the kit includes something like a toothpick and a toothbrush to find you dinosaur. I had experienced these before. We had small ones as party favors at Hudson’s previous dinosaur birthdays, but this one was huge. It had something like five dinosaurs in it, all broken down and scattered throughout the cinder block-sized dig site.

I remember watching Hud hunch over the block, holding the toothpick loosely like he held a pencil. Sometimes I helped speed things along by cracking the block open with a hammer, or breaking off large chunks of empty sand, but when the rib cages came out with sand still stuck firmly in between the rib, I thought about Harry Eastlack and spaces in his body that were covered in bone, much more permanent than these slightly sandy dinosaurs. I was bothered by the fact that Hudson didn't even clear all the sand out of the the dinosaur's ribs before snapping their flimsy parts together. I realized that all we have left of Harry and the dinosaurs are their skeletons that at one time housed living beings, and fueled their everyday activities, or froze them. I thought about the people of Pompeii, covered in volcanic ash. Mummies frozen on their knees, praying.

This year, for my seventeenth birthday, Hudson gave me a white journal with green dinosaurs on the cover. He specified to me that while Spinosaurus and T-Rex are in the same habitat on this cover, they did not live on the same continent or even during the same time period. He drew me a birthday card where two dragon-like dinosaurs have speech bubbles, wishing me a happy birthday. He is the same brother I watched six years ago dig up dinosaurs from sand. While, maybe his obsession with dinosaurs has waned slightly, he still is completely in love with them. It’s like that ex-boyfriend you never got over.

Hudson still has a favorite dinosaur, although it changes frequently. Like how every once in a while, you check up on that ex-boyfriend, see how they're doing. As of yesterday it is the Spinosaurus. And get this: he told me that the Spinosaurus actually absorbed sunlight through its “sail,” boosting the giant reptile’s metabolism. “No, I’m dead serious,” he said, waving his hands closer and closer to my face, “Spinosaurus actually gained energy, increased bite force, and muscle power from his sail.” I looked it up. The kid is right. Spinosaurus couldn't spend long periods in the dark, just like a plant.

Right now Hudson and I exist in two worlds that don't orbit the same rings, except for brief moments when we connect like when discussing crocodiles and their close relations to dinosaurs, or the discrepancies on the cover of my new journal. When we dug up dinosaurs, I made revelations about the permanence and impermanence of our bodies, while Hudson became frustrated with the rock-hard sand separating him from his toys. In twenty years, this difference in ages will be nonexistent. Even now, he still lives totally and completely in his own world, the world of an eleven year-old boy, where the only thing he needs from me is someone to relay his scientific findings to, a warm body that will listen to him talk.

Hudson and Americans

“Did you know Sophie, that technically there is no such thing as an American.”

   -Hudson

And so I ask him about the Native Americans, not to be mistaken with Indians. I had been recently re-reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and so the topic of Native Americans was on my mind. Hudson ignores my question for a little while.

The two of us are floating in a hot tub the temperature of two hour bathwater, overlooking the Caribbean Sea. We are spending spring break in Curacao with our mother, an island of cacti, Dutch food and a history of lucrative slave trade. We spend early mornings snorkeling, and tanning on man made resort beaches and our afternoons sightseeing. Yesterday it was the aquarium with suspiciously empty tanks, and shallow water in which wounded nurse sharks swim circles around each other. Today it was the Kura Hulanda Museum of Slavery. Hudson hated it.

Maybe it was the cages, or the neck braces with spikes protruding outward to prevent sleep. Maybe it was the basement constructed to simulate being in the bottom of a slave ship, shackled inches from other humans. But Hud did not want to partake in the learning. He didn't care that the only export on the island came from the Sint Marie salt ponds because the climate of the island was too dry to farm. He didn't care that the people of Curacao say that slavery ended in 1964 with Martin Luther King Jr. He sat on a bench outside the Voodoo Building, and pouted. Something was clearly bothering him. Maybe it was the fact that my mother had refused to buy him an overpriced souvenir a few hours earlier, but I doubt it. I saw something close to fear in his eyes as he looked at the KKK uniforms hung as casually as one would hang their jacket in a closet. The dirty white of the canvas contrasted with the black walls that made up the museum. Something about seeing the cloth in person and being close enough to touch it made my voice catch in my throat.

Back in the hot tub, Hudson formulates his response. He says, “Well, why did we take all their land then? It sucks.” This is probably the same thing he was thinking about when we were in Kura Hulanda. Why did we take these people’s lives? It sucks. These are questions I don’t have an answer for, leaving Hudson with the image of a black man hooked through the ribs and strung up on a tree like a slaughtered pig, or children his age shackled together by their necks. But I think it is my lack of answers for him that frustrates him the most. But for now, he lets the jets of the hot tub puff up his swimming trunks with air, and he floats away.