James Scruton

My son's been learning time: big hand and little, powers of sixty and of twenty-four, the slow semaphore of days. He's brought home paper plates from kindergarten, arrows pointing at his favorite hours. So far the face of every clock has smiled. And before we read to sleep each night he crosses off another square on the calendar above his bed, counting down to Christmas or to nothing in particular, sometimes just a line he draws uphill or down, check marks like the ones his teacher leaves on sheets he's filled with capitals and lower cases, other times a pair of thick lines like the crossed bones on a pirate's flag, an X as if to mark the treasure buried in some ordinary week, no day yet a cross to bear.

There are, of course, theories about the wide-eyed, drop-jawed fascination children have for them, about how, before he's learned his own phone number or address, a five-year-old can carry like a few small stones the Latin tonnage of those names, the prefixes and preferences for leaf or meat. My son recites the syllables I stumble over now, sets up figures as I did years ago in his prehistory. Here is the green ski slope of a brontosaur's back, there a triceratops in full gladiator gear. From the arm of a chair a pterodactyl surveys the dark primeval carpet. Each has disappeared from time to time, excavated finally from beneath a cabinet or the sofa cushions, only to be buried again among its kind in the deep toy chest, the closed lid snug as earth. The next time they're brought out to roam the living room another bone's been found somewhere, a tooth or fragment of an eggshell dusted off, brushing away some long-held notion about their life-span or intelligence, warm blood or cold. On the floor they face off as if debating the latest find, what part of which one of them has been discovered this time. Or else they stand abreast in one long row, side by scaly side, waiting to fall like dominoes, my son's tossed tennis ball a neon yellow asteroid, his shadow a dark cloud when he stands, his fervor for them cooling so slowly he can't feel it— the speed of glaciers, maybe, how one age slides into the next.