Where we walked, an ocean once covered the land, impassive but turbulent, with volcanoes arising from the sea floor. My son was fascinated by the distant past, so I told him about it.

“Really?” he asked.

“Sure,” I answered. “Three billion years ago.”

“Wow! Was that before the dinosaurs?”

“Yep, a long time before the dinosaurs.”

I took his hand as we waited for the light to cross the street. He didn’t resist. He was quiet and I could tell his active mind was rolling something over and over. He could trust me about crossing the busy street, but wasn’t so sure I knew about something that happened three billion years ago.

“Dad, how do you know these things?”

Unsure myself, I didn’t answer right away. Finally, I said, “See that museum where we’re going? Well, I learned about it in there.” That satisfied the doubt in his five-year-old brain, at least for the moment.

At that age and still today, nearly fifty years later, my son had a ravenous mind. I loved to feed it, to watch him devour what I taught him, to feast on the learned knowledge of many others. We prowled museums, first when we lived in Chicago and then in New York, not just ogling the dinosaur bones but reading the tombstones at the exhibits to feast on the descriptions of what stood preserved before us. Before he even started school, my son could read the front page of the New York Times and sated his mind’s hunger with its columns of dense information.

He trusted me, too, even after the divorce he endured when he was ten. He outgrew museum trips with me, but graduated to deeper experiences backpacking in the Catskills and canoeing in the Finger Lakes. Long past holding my hand, he still followed my lead on the rocky trails along Esopus Creek. As he grew more independent and sure of himself, we explored the world further afield. Once, after his voice had changed and he was shaving regularly, we rafted the Usumacinta River between Chiapas and Guatemala and tramped the jungles there to see the Mayan ruins at Piedras Negras. Near the end of our journey we stopped to camp one night on a sandbar. As I carried an armful of brush away from the spot where he was setting up our tent, he called out to me to stop.

“Drop that stuff!” he commanded. “Right now!”

I dropped the twigs and sticks without question, but gave him a quizzical look. He pointed to the ground between us. Scorpions scuttled along the trail where they had dropped from the brush I had moments before carried in my arms. Our eyes met and we laughed at my carelessness.

I laughed, too, because I realized he had become a person I trusted the same way he trusted me. We hadn’t lived together for several years, but we were close. Father and son, we each took care of the other. I knew, too, he trusted me despite my flaws and failures.

From The Journal of My Seventieth Year