polka-dotted deep truths

A recent issue of The Horn Book included a tiny little short story by M.T. Anderson as part of their special "Boys and Girls" issue. (Horn Book is about books for children and young adults.) At the risk of breaking copyright laws, I'm going to quote the story here- a lot of it, if you know what I mean.

Coloring Dinosaurs

By M. T. Anderson

One morning in the second grade, our assignment was to color dinosaurs. A girl in my class came over and asked me what color a Diplodocus was. Suddenly, all of the things that usually made me an outsider—I was pale, weird, vacuously dreamy, and read a lot of books—made me appear to be an authority.

I did know about dinosaurs. So I tried to explain to Shirley that really, no one knew what color dinosaurs were.

As I talked, I watched my fleeting authority evaporate in her cute button-eyes.

So I quickly amended, “But the Diplodocus, yeah, he was green with a brown head.”

“Okay,” she said. “Tyrannosaurus?”

I made something up.

One of her friends said to her, “You’re listening to something Tobey says?”

“Only about how the dinosaurs were colored,” said Shirley, confidently crayoning one of the most ferocious of the earth’s carnivores pink with green spots.

If only I had been man enough to realize it, here, laid bare before me, was the One Great Secret of Masculine Authority:

If you don’t know the answer, bray about the subject loudly and confidently, and maybe no one will realize that you’re a complete idiot. People would rather hear a really stupid answer than believe there’s no answer at all.

In case you didn't know, I looooove M.T. Anderson. See previous post for more info. But I digress.

It's a great, compact piece of writing, but it's his final kicker of a sentence that really got me thinking. As a Christian, I don't believe there's anything that won't be answered in time. However, accepting that the answer is basically unknowable this side of glory is almost as hard. The idea that we have no control over when or how some answers come can really bug us- or maybe it's just me. So we accept, and sometimes vehemently defend, our polka-dotted dinosaurs without really testing them, just so we have something to call our own, a fast food sack in the hand because we can't wait for the Thanksgiving feast, or maybe we fear it'll never come. I'm all for polka-dots and star-gazing, as long as I remember which things I really know, and which ones I'm making up.