Ancient

Do you have a vivid memory from your childhood that still creeps into your mind from time to time? Not necessarily a scary or traumatic event, but something you witnessed and knew, even at an early age, that this was something significant or important and it stayed with you?  If you're like me you might have a whole library of these memories and living outside city limits, I got to witness loads of farm and nature events that city kids missed out on.

My neighborhood was adjacent to a large farm that had a pay lake for fishing-- luckily for me, they looked the other way for kids that lived nearby. I spent a lot of time around that lake, whether it was fishing, swinging on the  homemade swings that allowed you to go higher than the dorky aluminum set in my backyard, or maybe just admiring nature, I was there on a lot of sunny days. When winter came along it was a great place to ride my sled too....or it was until I rode my sled across the lake and Papa Joe very angrily told me about the lake being a warm spring lake and how incredibly dangerous my insanely fun sleigh ride had been. The NO SLEDS at the lake rule came to pass.

So one summer day after I had raided my dad's change bowl, I walked down to the lake hoping to score a Snickers from the little store that sold bait, tackle and snacks. Hoping is the correct word. The clerk for this store was an older blind man. When he accidentally gave you a Butterfinger or Zagnut you just said "Thank you" and that was that.  That day I got lucky in two ways. I got my Snickers and I got to see the ugliest, scariest fish I had ever seen in my 8 years of life. 

There were concrete holding tanks near the store that occasionally had fish in them and this time there was a gar.  Of course I didn't know what it was called then, I just knew it was creepy and odd and it was almost as long as the holding tank it was in. In fact, the fish was so big it couldn't turn around, so it just hovered there with that scary toothy grin. And I stood there for a long time totally enthralled with this fish, that was almost as big as I was. Some of the men would stop by and look at it on their way home and it seemed the general consensus was it was not worth the trouble to try and kill it and clean it for its meat. So to my delight the gar was kept alive in the holding tank for a long time. I visited it often and when I thought about him, the word ANCIENT always came to mind.

Sometime later when I learned about dinosaurs, I realized why I associated it with something ancient. Gar fossils are dated back to the late Jurassic age. This species of fish is 160ish million years old. I didn't understand the significance of the fish, when I was a little girl, but I am thankful that the kid I was, was curious enough and smart enough to realize I was seeing something unique.  The adult Kim tries to impart this curiosity to my grandson now. We have marveled at fish, butterflies, birds, toadstools, flowers, etc. I hope he can look back at some of those moments and appreciate them later in his life, the way I appreciate those memories now.