Parking Lots #5

If I travel far back in time I am able to observe dinosaurs. Sometime around age 5 I went with my parents in the car to a fiberglass dinosaur exhibit in a shopping center parking lot. They were huge—bigger than a kindergartner! —on flatbed trucks. I remember their automaton necks wagging, a flash of plastic teeth, the flip of a tail. I riddled my parents with questions: Are they still around? How long ago did they die out? Were they really this big? What did they eat?

They were the most majestic thing I’d ever seen, and later, whenever passing that shopping center, I’d scan the parking lot for remnants of dinosaurs.