The museum and me
The story of a boy who loved dinosaurs.
Memories
I stand there, looking up at the nondescript door. STAFF ONLY is stenciled in large, bold print. I must be only about seven or eight years old.
“Mom, what’s in there?”
“That’s for the people who work at the museum.”
“Can I go in?”
“No, not today, Tommy. But I’m sure one, when you’re all grown up, you will.”
Dinosaur dreams
When I was a kid in the 1990s, my parents would occasionally drive the family into New York City during the summer for day trips. Sometimes we would stop at a restaurant, perhaps go sightseeing or shopping. But Mom and Dad knew there was only one place in the City that I wanted to be: The American Museum of Natural History.
The AMNH was my favorite place on earth. It was, for all intents and purposes, my Disneyland. And the star attractions were the dinosaurs!
The entire fourth floor of the museum of the is devoted to the sprawling fossil halls, two of which are reserved for dinosaurs. For a little boy consumed by a passion for all things prehistoric, it was (and still is) a magical place.
Do you remember Timmy, that dinosaur-obsessed kid from Jurassic Park? Well, I don’t think it’s far off the mark to say that for most of my childhood, I essentially was Timmy.
I decided quite early on that my life’s ambition was to become a dinosaur paleontologist. I wanted to write books about dinosaurs. I wanted to dig up fossils. I wanted to work in a museum—more specifically, I wanted to work in the American Museum of Natural History.
Growing up
There’s a wonderful quote from science fiction author Ray Bradbury that has served me pretty well as a philosophy of life:
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
I never really grew out of my “dinosaur phase.” When most other boys I knew in grade school became interested in sports, computers, or video games, I was still drawing pictures of dinosaurs, collecting dinosaur figures, and burying my nose in the latest dinosaur books.
Later, in college, I bounced around several different majors before finally settling on anthropology, which allowed me to get invaluable hands on experience studying fossils.
As it turned out, my mom was right—I did end up finding out what was behind those STAFF ONLY doors at the AMNH. While I was still working towards my degree, I was accepted as a volunteer in the museum’s Division of Paleontology. It was a dream come true!
For six years I cleaned, prepared, and rehoused fossils from the museum’s immense collections. Granted, it wasn’t a paying position, but I got to spend a whole day every week doing work I loved, and making friends with people who shared my “dinomania.”
I thought long and hard about attending graduate school for paleontology. I was even accepted to a master of science program in 2017. Sadly, I was not financially or emotionally ready for grad school and I had to defer my enrollment indefinitely.
After a lot of hard work and many rejections, I was finally hired as a paid museum employee in 2019. I worked as an intern in the Biological Anthropology Lab until the emerging COVID-19 pandemic shuttered all the museums in New York City. By May of 2020, I was out of a job.
Providentially, at about the same time as the pandemic hit, I began publishing my first freelance articles online. I rediscovered my childhood enthusiasm for writing and storytelling at a critical juncture in my own life-story.
Dreams and illusions
In the book A Good Life: 15 Essential Habits for Living with Hope and Joy, His Holiness Pope Francis shares a striking bit of wisdom about what to do when a long-cherished dream starts to fade away:
The end of a '“dream” can make us feel dead inside. But failures are a part of life and can sometimes be a grace! Frequently, something we thought would bring us happiness proves to be merely an illusion, a false idol.
For the past four years, I’ve worked hard to build a reputation as a freelance writer, but I’ve also hoped against hope to return to my first loves: paleontology and natural history. But it’s been a painful experience often accompanied by failure.
Competition in the field of museum science has only intensified since the pandemic. Most of my applications don’t even meet with a boilerplate rejection email—complete “radio silence” has been the norm.
Perhaps I’ve been desperately trying to hold on to a dream that has faded into an illusion. Perhaps it’s time to move on. But when I’m brutally honest with myself, I can admit that I’m afraid to let go.
Somehow, abandoning my “dinosaur dreams” would feel like a betrayal of that little boy who stood staring in wonder at the timeless giants on display in the fossil halls, and who wondered what secrets lay hidden behind that door marked STAFF ONLY.
Dreams transformed?
Sometimes dreams only seem to die. Our deepest, most authentic desires, the ones that are placed in our hearts by God, never truly disappear unless we let them. They can often leave traces in our imagination that over time become a permanent impression, like a fossilized dinosaur track.
Or our dreams become buried under the cares and anxieties, the disappointments and failures of so-called “real life”, like a dinosaur bone buried under sediment and rock for untold millennia, just waiting to be uncovered and brought to light.
Sometimes dreams even undergo a kind of evolution, and are transformed into a seemingly new desire, but which retains in its bones the unmistakable marks of its ancestry in the passions and loves of our childhoods.
So, what about my dream? Will I ever become a paleontologist? Will I ever find myself working in a museum again? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I know that whatever happens, my love for dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures will never go extinct.
As a professional writer, I have the opportunity to share the amazing lost world of the dinosaurs with all of you. What form is that going to take exactly? Well, I’m still not sure. But I hope that you’ll join me on the adventure.
And, by the way. . . Never stop dreaming!
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This is how I feel about being an artist. I'm not an artist like I thought I would be (fine art isn't my schtick) but what I do Real and Honest and Truthfully Me, and that's enough, even if it doesn't look the same. ❤️