Susan Baur

In my last years of training, I worked at a large public hospital and there took care of--or more accurately learned from--a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that he and I were both dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, he taught me, stroll for hours through the hot summer fields behind hospital buildings looking for half-empty cans of Coca Cola, cigarette butts, and naked women. They eat pumpkins which they break open with their enormous feet. I adored the Dinosaur Man, as I came to think of him. Perhaps my affection was influenced by my recent divorce and the death of my father, for the Dinosaur Man’s loneliness seemed to match my own in that sad time. Or perhaps it was the strange tales he told which caught my imagination. In any case, I wrote up my accounts of our meetings every day, and when I got my degree, turned my notes into the book Dinosaur Man.
-Susan Baur
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