When Dan was little, maybe five or six, we took him to a small folk-art museum.

While most children were racing past the exhibits, pressing elevator buttons, or begging for snacks, Dan stood completely still in front of a clay bowl. He was just learning to read, but he studied the label like it held a secret. Then he walked around the piece, looked from different angles, even leaned in as if the object might whisper something if he got close enough.

His mother whispered to the rest of us, smiling, “Look at Dan - so serious, so focused.” We were quietly proud. But that pride didn’t last forever. As the years passed, Dan’s museum visits became longer. Slower. More intense. He moved at a pace only he understood. One exhibit could take twenty minutes. An entire museum? The whole day.

“Dan, let’s go. There’s more to see.”
“Dan, we’re going to miss our next stop.”
“Dan, can you please walk faster?”

Even his brother, eight years older, usually patient, would shake his head and walk outside. “I need air. This is giving me a headache.”

So, we adapted. We found benches. We waited. We made jokes about museum marathons. We tried and often failed to gently pull Dan away from the objects he loved.

At first, I didn’t understand what he was doing. But one day, I watched him closely as he wandered through a historical site - a centuries-old ruin, somewhere in Latin America. He wasn’t just looking at stones. He was imagining. You could see it in his eyes. He wasn’t seeing the past. He was walking inside it. He traced the walls with his eyes and seemed to ask:
Where did the children play?
Where did the goats sleep?
Where did the cooking smoke rise?
What kind of seeds did they plant?
How did the wind smell at dusk?

To Dan, every ruin was alive. Every fragment was a window.

He never explained this to us, not directly. But we began to see it. The way he connected civilizations across continents. He didn’t separate ancient from modern, East from West. He saw it all as one long, continuous human story. He believed that people, wherever and whenever they lived, were trying to do the same thing:
Build a life with meaning.
Grow food.
Raise children.
Make beauty.
Leave something behind.

To him, the world wasn’t divided into foreign and familiar. It was one shared canvas. That’s why, no matter how far we traveled, from Peru to Paris, from national parks to tiny local museums, Dan never felt “abroad.” He was always at home, as long as there was something to learn, something to feel, something to imagine.

Recently, he told us he’ll be pursuing a Ph.D. in art history, focusing on 18th-century painting, sculpture, and pottery.

Maybe we should have seen it coming from the very first clay bowl.