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.