Day 16. The Dinosaur Who Lived in My Backyard

Book 68.

When I was in first grade I attended Art once a week. On once such occasion I painted a picture of a dinosaur standing in a swamp with trees surrounding the water. My art teacher liked it so much she sent it to the county fair. It won a blue ribbon. My mom framed that painting and it still hangs in her downstairs hallway.

Fast forward 20+ years to me sitting in bed with my son, reading books for the shelf challenge, and coming across our first dinosaur book of the challenge, The Dinosaur Who Lived in My Backyard, wherein a brother and sister liken the dinosaurs to children of today in the way they ate vegetables, made friends, and sometimes had terrible fights. It's a cute book and it works really well for preschool-aged children.

But as I approached the book's conclusion, I opened to a page that was the spitting image of my ribbon-winning dinosaur painting. This may be (have been) my first authentic experience with deja vu. The book was published in 1988, which means that it would have been published the year I started 1st grade. Might my art teacher have read it to us? Might I have been inspired by the very image whose copyright I now realize I was infringing? Or was this all just a really, really strange coincidence.

Either way, it's still pretty cool.

- Matthew