The Oracle of Dad

One of the secret joys of fatherhood is the fact that you matter to your child.

They want to know what you think, they want to know what you know. The questions are endless. To a child, often it must seem that a dad is a never-ending font of information, on every subject, be it shooting stars or what do unicorns eat...For me, it offers the chance to babble on all sorts of subjects with some degree of assumed authority, even when I really don't know what I'm talking about....

Zack asks some good solid, pertinent questions. It's great fun to hear them, even if the answers I can give him are often less then helpful.

"Water is clear right Daddy? So why is the lake blue?".

"Are their speed limits in the sky?"

"Why do you get bristlely on your chin?"

"What are boogers?"

"Is Bigfoot real?"

Everyone has their own personal collection of kid questions. Some you can answer. The problem is that Zachery has a very hard time when he asks something that I can't easily answer or that he can't understand. In many cases the questions he asks are good ones, penetrating to the heart of things in a way that many older, more sophisticated people would be unable to, due to the limits on their imaginations and the boundries that training, logic and reason tend to put on how we think.

I prevaricate madly, constantly, trying to disguise the fact that, well, the bitter truth is that Daddy really doesn't know all the answers and, unfortunately is not able to answer the Question of Life, The Universe and Everything. But the questions keep coming, getting more complex, more involved and sharper every day.

Eventually, I suppose the questions will stop, when he starts to find his own answers and school begins to outpace Dad as the source of all knowledge, but deep in the recesses of my heart, I'm secretly proud to be the recipient of so many queries, The Oracle of Dad, brief though the reign may be.

Comments are always welcome. You can reach me at dadchronicles(at)hotmail.com.