Under a Dinosaur Sky By Laura J. Oliver

When our mother turned 60, my sister living in Virginia, secretly drove up for the celebration and hid in my coat closet. Mom thought she was just coming over for a birthday dinner with her Maryland daughters. When she opened the closet to put her jacket away, my hidden sister leaped out, yelling “Surprise!”

Not our finest moment. Mom practically had a heart attack.

I mean, really. She had to sit down.

Surprise affects our brain chemistry with noradrenaline, a hormone released when we are startled, and the fact that surprise intensifies emotion by 400 percent may be why I remember not only this, but another long-ago winter night I would not recall otherwise.

Surprise may also be learning’s secret sauce. Each new piece of information is a surprise that enlarges my world, and what pleases me even more is that once I possess a new interesting fact, I can share it.

(Did you know that research shows the scent of women’s tears lowers aggression in men? Tears drop levels of testosterone. But the response is only generated by tears of emotion, not watering eyes from cutting onions.) If only men could be exposed to the tears of every mother, wife, sister, and daughter before the order for ground troops. How many tears need to be shed for world peace?

The surprise of new information opens up the brain like the dome of an observatory. Did you know that when dinosaurs reigned, they were looking at a different sky? It takes the Earth approximately 230 million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way, so in their heyday dinosaurs roamed the other side of the galaxy. The arrangement of stars overhead was not what you see now. In fact, in the sky they saw, Saturn had no rings, but it kind of didn’t matter.

An asteroid called K2 was heading their way.

Surprise…

One of my first surprises was not as dramatic as the obliteration of most species on Earth, but it was life-altering. In first grade at Lake Shore Elementary on Mountain Road, where there was no lake, hence, no shore, and not a mountain in sight, I met a six-year-old classmate named Becky. One day I asked Becky where she lived, and being a six-year-old, she drew the map to her house in the air. We were standing in front of the brick, one-story school in sight of the flagpole. “You go out the school driveway and do this,” she said, making an upside-down L-shape turn to the left with her finger.

I was not only surprised, I was stunned.

That couldn’t possibly be correct. Because to get to my house, you drove out of the school driveway and turned right. I simply had no paradigm in which anyone lived in a different direction or neighborhood other than my own.

As insignificant as that exchange with Becky seems now it was my first revelation that the world was bigger than my experience of it. That not everyone lived on my road or inside my head. That not everyone sees the same sky.

Surprise.

Not long after that, I saw surprise in action at home. It had been snowing all day, and we’d been stuck in the house—dusk fell early, by 4:30 or so. It must have been just before Christmas or Mom’s birthday in February. It was certainly the season of gift giving. She had built a fire and closed the cream-colored curtains against the stone-gray twilight. Dad had gone out in the bitter cold several times—perhaps to bring in firewood or to brush snow off the car.

Having grown up on a farm, gone to college on scholarship, and put all their money into building Barnstead, the contents of my mother’s jewelry box were sparse, and luxuries were few. Mom owned necklaces made of cowrie shells my father brought home from the war in the Pacific, her college sorority necklace, and a locket that held their photographs, but little else, and nothing of value.

I was constructing a house made of pop cycle sticks and Elmer’s Glue at the maple dining room table when my father casually asked my mother, “Think the snow has stopped?

“Turn on the flood light. Take a look,” he suggested.

I put down the glue and ran to the picture window, too. The floodlight beamed down on the yard from what had been the hayloft. If you looked up into the light as the flakes swirled down, it was as if you were inside the storm.

Mom flipped on the switch, pulled the curtain aside, and gasped. A smiling snowman stood caught in the glistening spiral of this blanketed landscape. Instead of sticks, his arms had been sculpted in front of him, and a diamond ring sparkled in his cupped snowy palms.

Surprise.

Saturn will not always wear the icy diamonds that encircle her now. Most planetary rings last a mere 40 million years. My mother’s ring is gone, as is Barnstead, as is childhood, as are the parents who made me.

What has stayed with me is the delight and surprise of learning something new.

The world will always be bigger than my experience of it. But each time I discover another piece of her magic, I will come looking for you.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.