Why did the coffee taste bolder today, the prickly burrs less tetchy and the -ituses of life feel less inflammatory? How come the sun shone with postwar respite? Why did it seem like all the trees cast knowing winks?

Today the unmistakable crisp of societal rebirth was in the air. Had a UN body gathered to do more than rack up exorbitant travel expenditures to convene in exciting, informal European capitals to sign their name to documents drafted to contain ambitious appendices and far reaching resolutions that even homeless George who lives in the alley behind your building could tell you will not alter national habits of each country’s industrial complexes that cast toxins into the biosphere like children clutching a loaf of bread before a duck pond?

Nope. It wasn’t that.

Had the kittens stopped being little bitches and jumping on the coffee table to devour my food each time I turned my back for a second even though they had just been fed?

Negatory.

What was it about today today that scented every ounce of atmosphere with the spoor of the illusive dream bird?

Was it because someone had installed a hot shower in this house and I no longer have to use the cold bucket?

Had I received an email from a literary agent leading with something other than the ubiquitous ‘we regret to inform you?’

Had the child eating lion of Kisumu finally reformed its ways?

Did China get its act together!!!

Were broken hearts no longer here to stay? Had somebody given the donkey something to smile about? Had someone trained an army of mongooses to kill coons? Did Tuvak find his home? Were the shepherd and the wolf on speaking terms again?

As far as I know, not any of those things.

But today, in this 2013 year of our lord, a Tyrannosaurus Rex was born from a blue capsule. 

I’ve been keeping tract of the days with dinosaurs, each day hatching one from a capsule.  Several brontosauruses had been born. Two stegosauruses three velocerapters and way more pterodactyls than seems prudent.

We were down to the last two capsules. I began to give up hope. Is it possible, I mused, that Greenbrier International Inc., the makers of Grow Capsule, would neglect to include the king of the dinosaurs in a package of dinosaur capsules? Would they leave the other dinosaurs without their king?!

I began to doubt them and their whole China based manufacturing operation. Their business plan, their right to be sold in dollar stores across the USA.

It was the bottom of the ninth with two outs, the second to last capsule. 13 dinosaurs had been born.  And then just like a worm leaving his shameful past in the cucumber patch to become a butterfly, a Tyrannosaurus Rex emerged from the last blue capsule.

Because of his affinity for the Wu-Tang Clan, I named him Michael Herman after, well, Mike Herman.

I’ve decided to raise him as my own. Lil Michael, the dinosaur.

Of all the books I brought to Kenya for the orphans, there was one I kept. It was not that I didn’t think the orphans deserved it, I just knew that I deserved it more and that one day, for some reason, I would need it.

The reasons for that decision have now emerged. Someone needs to teach this baby Tyrannosaurus about his brood, and this book was written for just such a lesson.