Ordovician observationist

  My son, Nathan, wrote this to his son, Nico, my first grandchild. .  It tells you a lot about both of them. (Photo:  Jurrasic Coas, Dorset, UK)

Last Sunday, at a neighbor's easter egg hunt, I noticed my son Nico squatting in the planted bit of dirt between their house and a walkway to their front door. This, while the other 10 kids were running around the yard chasing... something. They were playing, yelling, etc... I was concerned about my boy, sitting there by himself in such an odd place, so I went over to see what was up. I noticed he was softly stroking a small, nascent plant, only a few inches tall. I asked him what he was doing. He said, "This is a fern, it goes back to the dinosaur age." It was only then that I saw that it was indeed a baby fern, barely recognizable as such, with its small arms starting to uncurl. To him, it was a physical touchstone to a world we can scarcely imagine, and he was enraptured by it. He was absolutely right to be so, and I was thankful that he took me to that space. Ferns, sharks, molusks and other ancient creatures, have, as a species, made a couple of spins around our Milky Way galaxy, a single one of which takes about 250 million years.

This from a boy who gets quite excited when I confuse animals that existed in the Ordovician period with those from the Devonian (Do you know when Jaekelopterus existed? He does. And he can pronounce it correctly).

Nico was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. He still has trouble propelling himself in a swing, and he's no prodigy with a baseball bat, and, yes, he sometimes acts, completely unlike his father, 'weird'. But his mind is already racing to the far corners of our universe. I only hope that as his father that I can be a worthy guide.