Oh, you remember this social gambit. If you could have
dinner with anyone, or three or five, from the past, who would it be and why
goes the inquiry. Because is not an
answer. Okay, I threw that restriction into the mix.
So back you reach, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, and
Cleopatra. Now that is a game gang of throne-sitters.
Or, Ho Chi Minh, Thomas Paine, and Spartacus. No, you go
figure.
Marie Curie, Marie Laveau, and Marie Antoinette. Go
ahead, laugh. And, one more, Marie Callender. Laugh. Out. Loud.
Me? Seriously? Well, I would change to the other game. Literally
me, back in time, not having so-and-so break bread with me around the patio
table.
Diogenes? Further back. Narmer? You think going back
5,000 years is some kind of way-back travel?
No, I’m looking for a warm meal—hippopotamus perhaps—around
200 million years ago with a small band of Homo
erectus, maybe at Koobi Fora in what is now Kenya.
But I’m not there for the cookout, I’m there because this
early relative apparently lacked the anatomy necessary for speech.
Yes, I’ve gone back to visit, hoping to be there when H e with several companions happen to
catch a clear night where they can look up and see the sky awash with millions
of stars. I want to hear that very particular human utterance voiced for the
first time: Ahhh.
Their mouths agape, perhaps they unconsciously reach out
to one another, do they exchange looks—baffled, curious, surprised? Do their
faces register astonishment as we see on the face of a child’s first experience
of an overwhelming sense of something beyond their comprehension?
I go too far. I wield a vocabulary 10 million generations
in the making. No, I have gone back to witness a vocalizing, not a verbalizing.
To share the unspoken, to connect via experience without the analyses and
extrapolations inherent now in human language.
Just being, in the moment. No science. No dogma. In awe,
back in the day.
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