We visited the arboretum. There was a heck of a line. The kids were impatient, so Vicki took them to the cafeteria for a pop while I kept our place in line. I chatted with a couple from Philadelphia. You flew all the way here for this? Well, they also had a kid in college who was just a few hours away, so they’d decided to make a whole little vacation out of it. They’d heard about it in one of their Facebook groups. Me? I’d read an interesting article in Scientific American. Ooh, Scientific American, they repeated, in a tone that made it seem like some sort of accomplishment.
         The line was pretty long, and snaked all the way through the building and out into the parking lot, but it was moving pretty fast. Already while we’d been talking we must have moved a good thirty feet, and I was beginning to think I should call Vicki to make sure she and the kids got back before the staff let me in, when they came back on their own.
         They’d had ice cream, she told me. I introduced them to the Philadelphia folks: this is Vicki, Vincent and Veronica. Oh how charming, said the lady (Misty). Va-va-va-voom, said the guy (Ray), and we smiled. And I’m Kevin, I said, I don’t fit the pattern.
         There’s no crime in that, said Ray.
         Then we were in the arboretum. It was hot, with sunlight streaming through the glass roof, and humid from little nozzles spraying the plants everywhere. Up at the far end there was a crowd of people, and everywhere we looked were flowers and green plants and growing things of all sizes and shapes.
         Don’t touch anything, said Vicki, but the kids were in a happy mood, content to just look at it all.
         In a few minutes we’d made it to the front. The flower was flanked by two security guys in olive tee-shirts and earpieces, like they were guarding a President. It was a little duller in color than it had looked in the magazine photos, but taller than I expected, reaching almost to the guards’ shoulders before drooping down another foot or so, and ending in the famous leathery and wrinkled pod.
         It upended the scientific consensus, I quoted to the kids. Previously from that far back they’d only found fossils of green seaweed, but then in central Africa, a place no one would have expected it, they found a pod of it encased in a sort of amber. As usual, I wished I knew more about it so I could impress the kids. For instance, what did they mean by a sort of amber, when presumably there weren’t any trees to form amber? Did the plant make the stuff itself, as a sort of way of hibernating? If so it had worked because after many trials and errors the scientists had managed to grow a living, full-size example. And so here we are.
         Ray and Misty looked quietly at the plant, hands folded, almost reverential. Vincent said, I’m gonna go give it a kiss. Shush, said Vicki, but it was almost like the plant had heard him, because as we watched, it straightened up and swayed its wrinkled leathery pod in our direction and a crack formed along the length of the pod, with a rotten-meat stink from a long time before meat even existed, and some thick golden goo started dripping from it and it almost seemed to smile, and inside the mouth we could see a tongue studded with a hundred thorns.
         The security guys jumped back, but it was already too late for them.
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