As I drove home from dodgeball last night (we won two of the five games against a team that had no girls), I started thinking about giant animals. Sharks in particular.
When I was in elementary school I loved sharks and dinosaurs. More than anything else about them, I was impressed by their size. I marvelled at pictures in which a silhouette of a Brontosaurus was shown standing next to a man. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see an animal that big out walking around?
Sharks were almost as cool as dinosaurs. The first time I ever saw a show on Whale Sharks, my dad took me to the back yard and measured out the length of a full-grown specimen against our house. I wished I could see one and swim with it in the ocean like the people I’d seen on TV.
My dad used to do a lot of sculpting and always had big blocks of molding clay sitting around. In minutes he could whip up a gorgeous model of a dinosaur or shark as my brother and I looked on in amazement. When I was in kindergarten, my dad helped me make a Tyrannosaurus Rex model that I took to class for a project. It was by far the coolest project. Unfortunately, the AC wasn’t so great in the temporary building where our class was, so the T Rex had to be moved to the library before it melted. It had toothpicks for teeth!
Another year, when I was a bit older, my brother and I helped my dad make Great White Shark costumes for Halloween. Those were really cool. And they were so big we had to be really careful walking around in them so we wouldn’t break off the tails. I have to ask my dad if he still has pictures of those somewhere. We kept the costumes around all winter. Then, in the spring, we took them out to the local reservoir and took some pictures of them on the beach. What a hoot.
My dad loved Halloween. Still does. When I was probably seven or eight, he helped us make dinosaur
costumes out of paper mache and cardboard. I was a Pterodactyl, and Scott was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. My costume had cool hindged wings that I could flap by pulling down on two pieces of wood onto which we’d fastened some dyed fabric (there was always lots of fabric, dye, cardboard, paint, and hot glue at our house). Scott and I actually won a costume competition that year; as I recall, the prize was a big bag full of candy. SCORE! It was right around the time Star Wars had come out, so every Tom, Dick, and Anakin was walking around with a light sabre and a Darth Vader mask. No one ever saw us coming!
I hope I can manage to get Ava interested in stuff like this. She’s big into babies right now. Everything is “baby?” this and “baby?” that. We have a great room in the basement that would make a perfect workshop. If nothing else, maybe I could make some cool costumes for myself down there. I have to go pick up a hot glue gun.