My God, the kid must be lonely. No one understands him, I bet. In fact, Archimedes seemed to spend most of his days alone, wandering around, poking at things. He was constantly working at something: either picking apart plants, or smashing rocks, or smashing things on rocks, or digging in unlikely places. It was obvious to me that he was investigating and cataloguing his world. He would have gotten no help from his parents—they and everyone else seemed to be in the pointy-stick stage and quite satisfied with that. They weren’t even straightening the sticks, so the things couldn’t really be called spears.