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Lots bravely attempts to continue. "Right. So anyway, I was hoping to tell you--" But Barbara Walters is off, riding the tides of memory into her past--her unimaginably distant past. Nearly half a billion years ago, in fact, when life on Earth was just starting to mess around with the concept of living on land, and those new-fangled internal skeletons were still just a passing fad. "We'd go camping, my family and I. And my brother and I would go fishing for trilobites and anomalocarids--they were like shrimp, only six feet long, with a funny mouth kind of like a camera shutter--anyway, we'd catch buckets of the trilobites, and then we'd use a few to bait the anomalocarids--" "I-I...ummm.." "--Then we'd all build a firepit for the luau, and we'd build the fire up nice and big, and we'd lay in spicy sellaginella fronds and lycopodium leaves over the coals...and then we'd lay in the mussels and clams and the larger trilobites and the anomalocarid tails--you haven't ever lived until you've tasted anomalocarid tail, it's better than lobster--and we'd lay in some Prototaxites spore pods (they taste sort of like corn does nowadays) and some cooksonia roots, and we'd cover the whole thing with more leaves and we'd bury it, and then we'd play volleyball and sing songs by the campfire until dark, when we'd break open the pit, and everything had been roasted to a turn by then. I guess you can't get anomalocarids anymore--I suppose they went extinct, along with everything else." Thud...thud..thud...the sound of Lots beating his head against the wall finally broke through her reverie. "Are you okay? I know, it takes nothing to remind me of those days. Sometimes I just go on and on. Like the first time I left home, to attend university, I had a trilobite in a tank then as a pet--clever little things...and my first roommate had a gremlin she kept in a box..."
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7/25/2008 5:22:47 PM
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