The planes were now dinosaurs. I’d been spending the afternoon with my niece Jess. We walked to a field nearby so that we could have a picnic, when she suddenly looked up to the sky at a plane and announced it was a T-Rex. “Tyrannosaurus 747,” I said. “Stegosaurus 777,” she said. She’d been collecting model planes and dinosaurs since she was 5, so I suppose the strange fascination with calling them dinosaurs made sense. We were about to eat our peanut butter and pterodactyl sandwiches when a man stealing what appeared to be a stuffed ostrich ran by. The toy store owner and a policeman were running behind. The thief tried to jump over a stone wall and tripped. The policeman waved us over. Apprehensively, we walked over to him. The thief on the ground didn’t seem to be moving. “Do both of you want to tell me something?” he said. “We were having a picnic,” I said. “And naming flying dinosaurs,” Jess said. The officer pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. “If you’d be so kind to write down your confession,” he said. “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “That’s not what you just told me, and the little one here corroborated it,” he said. “You’re a big fat Triceracop!” she said. The officer ate the purse the man was carrying and the store owner knocked a few trees over as he returned to his store. The thief, apparently not dead, rose from the ground and holding his tiny little arms out in front of him, roared a deafening roar that rattled the red and yellow maple leaves and caused many to fall to the tall grasses. Then he turned and ran for the highway. The officer gave chase and took out the side of an old sugaring shack long abandoned. Jess picked up the stuffed ostrich the thief had dropped. “Should we return this to the store owner?” she said. “It’s the right thing to do,” I said. We returned the stuffed animal and the owner told us we were never allowed in the store again, and that if he saw us loitering outside the fuzz would be called. But things were looking up. We still had our pterodactyl sandwiches to eat and Jess’s Aunt would be landing in her private velociraptor jet in about an hour. We waited for her to return home while we watched the neighborhood volcano from our living room window blow its top again.