It’s Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday today, and there are plenty of places to read about how brilliant he was, and how his theories revolutionized the way we think.

You won’t read that here, however (even though it’s true).

One night, when I was a teenager–I must’ve been about 14, because my mom had already left by then–I was sick with a cold or something. All I remember is I felt crappy and I wanted someone to get me medicine or something or just make a fuss of me. Since it was the middle of the night, all of our apartment’s inhabitants were sleeping (we had a motley crew of friends and relatives living with us at any given time). Anyway, I went into my dad’s room, because I just wanted to be taken care of, damnit, and I tried really hard to wake him up. A very hard task.

Eventually, he sat up and said “Darwin was right!” in an emphatic tone, and lay back down and went right back to sleep.

I went and took care of myself. But I always thought it was really cool that my dad was dreaming about Darwin.

Happy Birthday, Charles!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 11:45 am and is filed under Dad, birthday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.