The 20th Century Dinosaur

The following is one of my earliest surviving works of fiction. I started writing stories as soon as I knew how to write (c. late 1976), but little if anything remains of my literary creativity from before my 4th grade year, when I composed this tale.

This story has been transcribed faithfully from the original manuscript of December 25, 1980. I have even preserved the mysterious misspelling "refrigetar". I say mysterious because I was an excellent speller, and it seems to me rather surprising that I would have misspelled the word refrigerator at all, let alone so egregiously. I did sometimes purposely alter the spelling of words so as to invent some similar but new concept, and that may be what I had in mind in this case; but, to be quite honest, I have no memory of any such intention, and it may actually have been simply a terrible misspelling. In any case, I am leaving the text as is so as to faithfully preserve what I wrote that Christmas Day when I was 10.

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The 20th Century Dinosaur

One day, a boy found an egg in his back yard. It was as big as his hand. He decided to take it to the dairy.

He took it there the next day. In a week, it was gone. The boy couldn't find it. He looked at the place where he had put it last.

There he found a baby dinosaur.

He ate leaves, grain, and fruit.

Pretty soon, he was as big as a cereal box. He grew every day.

One time, he got as big as an elephant.

The boy put him in a room of the 2-room shed. He put blankets in the room. Winter came pretty soon.

The dinosaur ate up to a refrigetar of food a day.

His dad told him to take him to a national zoo. He told him he could see him every year; but the dinosaur might live 150 or 200 more years.

So he took him to the zoo nearby.

In 2180, a boy was at the zoo, looking at the dinosaur. His grandfather told him, "my great-grandfather said that when he was real little his grandfather told him this was his dinosaur."