Rudy Zallinger and the Canvas of the Past

Lately I’ve been thinking about the past and reworking it in my mind. In one pile are the things I should have done, but didn’t. In the other are the things I did do, but shouldn't have. I wonder if the piles somehow could switch places if things would be a different in my life.

Probably not.

In order to stop the first pile from becoming a bigger mountain of regret than it already is, I gave serious thought to what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. After a few moments of introspection I discovered that I always wanted to as travel.

So now I go places.

In 2005 I visited New York City for the first time. Forget anything you have ever heard about the place. I found the city complex, friendly, endlessly interesting and alive. I visited all the tourist traps: Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park, Grand Central Station, Ground Zero. At first it surprised me that Ground Zero was even considered a tourist attraction, but then perhaps that how Americans deal with tragedy- drop by, look around, buy a post card, move on.

(Come to think of it, other sites of man made disasters have become tourist stops: the Alamo, Gettysburg, and Jimmy Carter's birthplace come to mind.)

Most important of all, I visited The American Museum of Natural History. Founded by Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the museum is a gigantic brick structure adorned with columns and rows and rows of steps. Inside were a myriad of exhibits that included polar bears, insects, a blue whale and DINOSAURS.

I love dinosaurs.

(Some of the more traditional religions question the existence of the “thunder lizards.” Why, they ask, would God create such pointless and silly creatures? But then, He also created the platypus, parasitic wasps and conservative republicans. Not everything in this universe, it seems, has a point.)

The dinosaurs that live in my imagination inhabit a world conceived by Rudy Zallinger. A Siberian-born American (1919- 1995), he painted the famous mural THE AGE OF REPTILES that hangs in Yale’s Peabody Museum. Pieces and parts of the mural were used as illustrations for many of the dinosaur books I read as a kid. Life magazine in December 1952, in an article entitled The World We Live In, made liberal use of Zallinger’s paintings. These pictures made a lasting impression on me.

When I think about past, this is what it looks like.

To me, this mural is a surrealistic masterpiece. In the center stands the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, it’s body a walking contradiction of teeth, anger, and impossibly small arms. It’s both fearful and ridiculous.

The Natural History museum displayed the reassembled dinosaur bones in a great hall. All my favorites were there: the gentle Stegosaurus, the well armored and turtle-like Ankylosaurus, and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. I walked silently by, staring at each and taking as many photographs as I could.

I was slightly disappointed; they looked strangely domesticated frozen and nailed to the floor as they were. The dinosaurs that raged in my mind were massive, viscous, crawling, flying, fighting, living and dying. These skeletal displays were more like static x-rays that belonged in, well, a museum.

But that’s the nature of time and memory. The past is frozen in place, immutable and chiseled into the stone of long-ago. It can only be altered through the force of imagination.

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