As a boy, in Michigan...

The Exhibit Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor Somewhere around 1974 or 1975, I became fascinated with dinosaurs. I couldn't have been more than six or seven, and at that time, dinosaurs weren't marketed to kids like they are now. Most boys wanted to be baseball players or astronauts. I wanted to be a paleontologist. My mom can recall this much better than I can, but somewhere around that time we took an AMTRAK trip to Chicago to see the city. I couldn't wait to see the Field Museum and the wondrous dinosaurs skeletons that I could see. Apparently, on the train trip a paleontologist was on the trip, and, as it's been related to me, I kept him entertain with a precocious amount of knowledge on dinosaurs for a lad in first grade. Latin terminology, correct pronounciations, knowing what "saurischia" and "ornithischia" meant, the extinction of the dinosaurs...I was a six-year-old who wanted to learn more and more a...

The world seems so much larger when you're too young to drive. I was 14 when we moved from Michigan to El Paso, Texas, so I had never gotten behind the wheel of a car and truly learned how to navigate myself around the Ypsilanti, Milan and Ann Arbor areas. Visiting friends was a drive away, as our house was beyond a bike ride. Of course, certain patterns would become more familiar. The way to George Allan Elementary School on the school bus, or the short drive to Meijer's Thrifty Acres or the Exhibit Museum on the University of Michigan campus with my mom. When you're a kid living in a rural area, the street names become less important than just the route that you take. Familiar trees, houses or dogs at homes become your waypoints. But one place in my kid-size world that I would journey out to solo was Wiard's Orchards. Wiard's was probably only a mile-and-a-half from our house. A bumpy bike ride up the dirt-and-stone Crane Road, left turn at the open field (Merrit...