20. Time Begins
Years ago, when Lily was not quite four, we were spending one of those
perfect mother- daughter mornings in the flower garden: I planted pan-
sies while she helped by picking up the bugs for closer looks, and not eat-
ing them at all. Three is a great age. She was asking a lot of questions
about creature life, I remember, because that was the day she fi rst worked
up to the Big Question. I don’t mean sex, that’s easy. She wanted to know
where everything comes from: beetles, plants, us. “How did dinosaurs get
on the earth, and why did they go away?” was her reasonable starting
point.
How lovely it might be to invoke for my child in just one or two quotes
the inexplicable Mystery. But I went to graduate school in evolution-
ary biology, which kind of obligates me to go into the details. Lily and
I talked about the millions and millions of years, the seaweeds and jelly-
fish and rabbits. I explained how most creatures have many children
(some have thousands!) with lots of small differences between them.
These specialties—things like quick hiding or slow, picky eating or just
shoveling everything in—can make a difference in whether the baby lives
to be a grown- up. The ones that survive will have children more like them-
selves. And so on. The group slowly changes.
I’ve always thought of this as a fine creation story, a sort of quantifi able
miracle, and was pleased to think I’d rendered such a complex subject
comprehensible to a toddler. She sat among the flowers, pondering it. At