Timeline

By Richard Johnston

My sidewalk Solar System had proved a hit, so I decided to do time along the front of our house. The scale for this one was harder. Even after cutting the 4,000,000,000 years before the Cambrian, my chalk was too wide to distinguish the Holocene from the Neocene.

Then the real trouble began. The next morning, my wife discovered someone had written ‘God’ in large white letters where I’d placed the dinosaurs. I rinsed it off with a hose. Two days later, however, somebody spray-painted ‘Blasphemer.’

“Why don’t you stick with space,” my wife suggested as though it were my fault.