Wednesday, April 21, 2004

The End of Innocence

In this birthday countdown week, I’m going to continue my “ruminations on the passage of time and youth” by sharing two stories about some kids I knew once, and some lessons they taught me.  Here’s the first one:

I thought I was pretty wise but I guess I wasn’t in some big ways.  Regardless, I was a clever college grad with a live-in squeeze and a bright future.  This arsenal of favorable traits was critical, if I was to withstand the shame of being a nanny. 

Of course, my job title was “Assistant to the Executive Editors,” but they didn’t need any help either editing or executing anything.  They were at the top of their craft, writing a successful serialized tv drama.  A husband-and-wife team in their early 40s, they had suffered years of privation before being launched into unqualified tinseltown success.  What they needed help with, had less to do with work and more to do with life: paying bills, picking up things they’d bought, getting them lunch and - mostly - entertaining their infant son so he could stay with them in the studio production office all day.

Little JV and I got along great.  I revelled in my new identity.  I’d always been the cerebral one, observing from an intellectual remove, as long as I could remember - but now I got to be totally responsive, emotional, in the moment.  It was tiring and difficult, but surprisingly rewarding as well. 

Sometimes a situation would come up in which their older son R wold also need to be attended. This, too, was fine.  R was four, serious and very smart.  I enjoyed his company, After spending so much time with JV, it was good to ber able to really talk to someone, you know?

So I am tasked, one fine day, to get R out of the house for a while so his folks can do some work.  The museum, they say.  The one with all the dinosaurs. 

I know immediately which one they mean: the sunny and inviting Page Museum on midWilshire at the pits - one of those magical places where nature has actually forbidden the dominion of man.  Wilshire is a major boulevard lined with some of the most important and expensive real estate in the world - but right at midWilshire, between the hollow deco aspirations of the Miracle Mile and the crystalline excesses of Beverly Hills, stood a good-sized grassy park, not unusual in itself but for what was in it: LACMA, of course, and its associated collections, but also the La Brea Tar Pits.  They are real, and real old. I always loved them as a child - the pools of tar bubbling up from the planet’s core, some housing active digs where I could watch actual paleontologists chipping away at a clotted mass of matrix, the bones they’d found laid out behind them - and of course that heartbreaking moment frozen for 20,000 years in the big pit where a simulated concrete mommy mastodon sinks into oblivion, slowly, calling out in horror and sorrow to her cub, shown standing on the edge of the huge bubbling foulsmelling pit trumpeting futily.  And tar bubbled up out of the ground all over the place, and there was a cool museum full of bones.  I’d take R there - it would be fun.

I realized I’d made a mistake when we got to our destination and R asked me where we were.  I said, we’re going to the museum with the dinosaurs.  He replied, that’s somewhere else.  I thought twice.  There was another museum: Natural History, down by USC.  That’s a real schlep. But they do have dinosaur bones.  They have got about a billion other things, too; it would be as misleading to call it a Dinosaur Museum as it would to call Disneyland ‘that place with the pirates,’ but it was only misleading, not actually inaccurate.  “Inaccurate” would be me coming to the Page Museum for dinosaurs when the entire collection was paleolithic - from an era when humans walked the earth, or were damn close to doing so.  I was at the museum without dinosaurs.  But I still thought it was a good idea to go, so we soldiered on. 

We got to the main entry, across from the statues of the drowning mastodon, where wew stood awhile at the wire fence, watching the methane and sulphur bubble up from the interior of the planet. R gravely observed the plight of the plaster animals. He said nothing.

Inside the museum we stopped at the first display - two skeletal mastodons (sorry, dark photo), propped up as big as life, standing in naturalistic postures. One was as big as a panel truck; one was as petite as a smart car.  R looked at them for a while before turning to me to ask, “why is one big and one small?” “One of them, I answered, “was all grown up when it fell in the tar.  One wasn’t.” R took this information with seriousness and silence.  “I thought,” he eventually continued, “that only old things died.”

Something in me died right then and there.  I thought at the time it was old but really, it wasn’t.