I swear there's a photo somewhere of me and my dad out hunting for fossils. A rocky hill banks up to our left and he's showing me how to do something with a pickaxe. I've looked through all the albums I have, but I can't find it. The closest I get is this picture with my mom:

though I might have been thinking about some other father/son activity in nature, such as

which was fraught with its own stressors, or another one-on-one moment in which information is shared, or at least some love of life in all its forms, such as 

though ultimately, rank sentimentalist that I am, all I really wanted was

which is more than a lot of kids get. So really it had nothing to do with fossils. I can't explain why fossils are so important in my personal cosmology, but even forty years later fossils have a hold on me. We could have been out collecting bottle caps, sloughed off snake skins, old pieces of shoe leather....