from trevor’s encyclopedia of lost and beautiful things

A gigantic tooth and a mysterious shell washed up with the waves onto the shore.

“Wow,” he thought.

This was THE word he always thought when he was astonished.

“WOW,” he once wrote on a little note to his abuelo, “WHALES OF the WORLD!”

He smiled as the memory washed over him with the water and the tooth and the shell.

The tooth was a sperm whale's tooth, of this he was sure.

The sperm whale was one of his favorite whales.

The first picture he had ever drawn of a whale, before he visited the public library and checked out every book he could find about whales, was a sketch of a sperm whale.

This was before he learned that the brightness of a light bulb is measured by a lumen, which is simply the light one cup of sperm whale oil gives off.

This was before he memorized the field guide to the whales of the world.

That picture had come from somewhere deep inside of his heart.

He picked up the tooth with both hands.

It was a foot long, shaped like a cone, and made of ivory.

"This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "because they don't have any teeth in their upper jaws, only slots that the teeth from the lower jaws fit into.

If I sliced the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale as the rings of a trunk show the age of the tree.”

He gently laid the tooth beside him on the sand.

He picked up the shell with both of his hands, too.

"What a wonderful shell,” he thought. “Look at it’s shape and color.”

It was a conch shell.

It’s shape was a common shape in nature, formed by graphing the numbers 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on, the Fibonacci numbers, a special shape that appears many times in geometry, architecture, art, music and literature.

Some people call the shape ‘God’s blueprint,’ because it seems to be the plan from which God creates the world.

It's color was a common color in nature, too.

It was three shades of yellow.

It's spine was the brilliant yellow of the sun that rose every morning on the horizon of the sea and sky.

It's siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the peaches he and his abuelo and his mamí picked in the South Carolina summers.

It's aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.

He raised it to his tiny ear.

Someone told him once that if you hold a conch shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean inside of it.

"I wonder if it's true," he thought.

"If it is, I can take it on the migratory road and bring the great whales with me.”