My kid, Felix, is 7. He’s pretty crazy. Most 7-year-olds are. And I mean crazy in a good way (“fun” crazy, not “scary” crazy). Kids grow up fast and lose that kid thing we love so much so I wanted the most “kid-like kid” for as long as possible. His middle name is Turbo. That’s not an unofficial moniker, it’s on the birth certificate. I fought for legislation to make Turbo his first name, but I was aggressively overruled by the majority party (wife). The middle name was a bi-partisan compromise and I was shocked that that counteroffer was even accepted. If he didn’t act “Turbo-like”, it would have been a daily downer of non-stop conversations of people asking me why such a docile boy is named Turbo. It’s a much easier discussion now. “Dave, why did you name your kid Turbo?” “You’re asking me why I named my kid, Turbo…did you not just see him do 10 pullups on a random dad’s bicep?” I’m not much into the law of attraction but I definitely manifested a turbo-charged boy into existence.
One of the things you hear about kids is their insatiable desire to ask any question imaginable. This is not hyperbole, it is beyond true. Rapid-fire, seemingly random questions being hurled at parents with reckless abandon is most definitely a thing. Parents know this. Soon-to-be parents – get ready. It’s a different level of exhaustion that you will endure.
I must mentally prepare for the onslaught of questioning before a hang-out session with Felix. If my brain is not focused, or I am feeling sluggish or not “into answering things”, he picks up on it and goes in harder and with more intensity. I’ll purchase a few sketchy gas station energy drinks (the kind that you have to dig for in the dusty cooler in the back of the store; with a caffeine content far beyond what the FDA legally allows and a suspect list of ingredients the FDA is also highly skeptical about). I’ll guzzle those down and try to get my head in the game, knowing that any topic is on the table. Time to wake up, Dave!! When the questions come, they come fast – fast and chaotic.
I always try to answer Felix’s questions, as ridiculous as many of them are. He is not doing it to annoy me or as a goof so I respect the hustle. My mind fizzles out pretty quickly from his idiosyncratic logic. After a lengthy interrogation, I fade and get dizzy. I do the best I can – I try hard so he doesn’t feel I am dismissing him and the esoteric subject matter he needs to get off his chest.
Kids go through cycles of interest. Things they learn at school and activities they participate in with their friends usually dictate what’s important to them. My dude is 7, so he is all about topics like nature, sports, time, spiritual matters (God. Buddha. Santa Claus), and, the classic, “Who would win in a fight?”
What I have realized, in the last year specifically, is that I am not smart…at least not with basic world concepts. I thought I knew sufficiently how trees help the earth or how gravity works – until a kid presses me and insists on specifics of the science behind each topic. Telling Felix that trees suck up CO2 and gravity keeps us from floating away just doesn’t cut it, he will call me out. I must provide more info.
I thought I understood the basic concepts of government and law, until someone (a 7-year-old who knows nothing about government and law), demanded I break the whole system down and explain it from the ground up. We assume a lot about our intelligence and cognizance of things we feel we know – until some little bugger insists we prove that knowledge (the kid version of asking us to “show our work”). I seldom feel smarter after fielding a string of Felix’s questions, but I certainly feel tired. My brain wonders if I pulled a Billy Madison and went back to 2nd grade in order to take over my dad’s business. It triggers parts of my cortex that have been on autopilot for a long time. When he asks a question, he wants answers. And if it is something I don’t feel like answering, he maintains deadlocked eye contact until he gets the response. A razor-sharp stare, right through my eyes, directly into my soul. He doesn’t blink either. Going long periods of time without blinking is his superpower (his words, not mine.) “Really? Not blinking is your chosen superpower? Not invisibility or the ability to fly?” “No, Dad. Not having to blink is my superpower because I’ll win every staring contest, and being the best at staring contests is about the most important thing you can do in school.”
Are the people who built the pyramids dead? Are the people who built pyramids older than Martin Luther King? Is Martin Luther King old? Which is more sad – that Martin Luther King or the people who built the pyramids died?
Kids are fascinated with time – my kid included. The irony is he has NO concept of time. None. Most kids do not have a great grasp of time. A song or film that is 4 years old is ancient to an 8-year-old because it was half a lifetime ago for them. The fact that time is such a massive factor in Felix’s line of questioning is ironic and draining. Old is certainly subjective, and comparing things that are not easily comparable is no small task.
By all accounts, the people who built the pyramids are old (for humans). No living person could really say otherwise. Someone like MLK, who would be old compared to all living people, is almost universally considered old….but not compared to people who were born 4,500 years ago. Aaaaand…it’s happening again, A Felix question barrage has caused me to go off the rails. I know what I am trying to say (…old is predicated on length of time and relative to what is being compared), and you people know what I am trying to say…but the kid, the kid demands answers. Lucid, thought-out answers. Until he suddenly doesn’t. Then he informs me the discussion is officially over, and that I am now boring him. “Hey, Felix, what about all this dead pyramid vs. MLK info you insisted on asking me about?” “No, mas, Padre̾ ” I guess we’re done. At least he’s using Miami’s native language to address me.
The example questions above are decent illustrations of the type of clusters I am hit with. They follow a linear, yet non-linear path. Is this thing old? Is that thing old? Is the older thing being dead sadder than the less old thing? What is more sad, an older death or a more recent death? (… actually, what is the “most sad” is the sad fact I don’t even know the proper term for “more sad”. Is it “more sad”, “sadder”, or some other word I’m forgetting about? I’ll just use “more sad” and when a smarter person reads this they will enlighten me on this 3rd-grade level question that I can’t figure out. And then I’ll delete this part.)
The beginning of the Felix questions are objective, then they get more subjective. As the line of questioning moves forward, they end up becoming an exercise in existentialism. What is more valuable to this world, the people who built pyramids or a great civil rights leader whose life was taken too soon? What is happening in this 4-minute car ride from the house to the park? I didn’t sign up for this today. Well, too bad. I’m in the thick of it now and I can’t get out. Thank god I didn’t bring up the “aliens built the pyramids theory”, what a Pandora’s Box that would open. The alien theory would blow this kid’s mind into another dimension, literally. And by literally, I mean the way Gen X misuses the word literally, so….figuratively. Solar systems, galaxies, alien chatter, and, “Are we alone in this vast void called the universe?” are other very common, yet very impossible lines of questioning often enacted by the 7-year-old demographic. It never ends. Sometimes I just gotta tell him I don’t have the bandwidth to get into it. “Daddy, what’s a bandwich? Is that a sandwich with bandaids?”
My kid is not a savant who wants to get to the bottom of “space and time” philosophies. In many discussions with my wife about Felix, we have concluded that he will either invent something spectacular to help mankind or, he will end up living with us in our basement until he is 42, fighting imaginary space ninjas in a tattered, tomato-sauce-stained bathrobe. It could go either way at this point – odds are 50/50. I overthink my fun interactions with the kid because I overthink everything. I’m a Jew, that’s what we do – observe and obsess. He is funny as hell to me and even though his questions appear to be independent of each other, I do believe most kids have an innate, subconscious knowledge of “the bigger picture”. His asking “Who, how, and what is older” and “Who, how, and what is more influential on the world we exist in,” are simply individual questions. Yet grouped together the questions become more of a concept album. Like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, but for little people who still pick their nose and eat it.
“How many days until we go to Nana’s house?”
4 Days.
“How many seconds is that?”
A lot. A lot of seconds. Let’s do it in hours instead.
“How many seconds?”
345,600 seconds
“What?! I’m never going to see Nana again, that’s forever! Worst Dad ever for not letting me see Nana!”
You will see her in 345,600 seconds. Or better yet, 5,760 minutes. Or even easier, 96 hours. Or even easier than that, dude…..4 days!
His intrigue with time is also ironic because he is not at all interested in learning about units of time. It is like someone only wanting to watch movies in Italian, not knowing a word of Italian, and having no interest in ever learning Italian. He also does not care much for the practical measurements of time such as minutes, hours, and days. He seems to only want to know time in seconds. How long until we have to go to school? 15 minutes. How many seconds is that? Seconds? 900 seconds (I think). It is a completely inefficient way to measure time for anyone, especially someone who does not know the difference between 30 minutes and 4 hours. When you only deal with seconds, everything seems like a reeeeally long time. 5 minutes is 300 seconds, and 300 of anything to a kid seems like forever. It is completely illogical that he deals almost exclusively in seconds and he does not really mess with any other, much much more useful units of time. My math is getting better at least.
Who is faster, a dolphin or Godzilla? (also known as “Who would win in a race?”)
The essential kid question, “Who is faster?”, is only slightly less popular than the perennial favorite, “Who would win in a fight?” Both are subjective at best; especially when you are mixing different species and make-believe creatures. It’s tough to handicap a race like that, but the kids want answers. They don’t have time for any excuses why we (parents), don’t know who would win, and they want facts that support our choices (again…us needing to show our work). When kids ask if their dads can beat up or run faster than someone (“someone”, in this case, can mean a person, superhuman, or radioactive sea monster), it is necessary to keep the facade going as long as possible. Dads can destroy and beat anyone at anything. “Who would win in a fight, Daddy or Mike Tyson in his prime? Always Daddy. No doubt…. just keep that storyline going for as long as possible. Felix is starting to realize that I can be defeated, however. I thought I had a few more years of “championship aura” surrounding me. I guess not. He takes Brazilian Jiujitsu, and the gentleman who owns the Jiujitsu studio is a beast of a man, a 10x world champion named Cyborg. I gotta believe that Felix has resigned to the fact that Super Daddy may not be able to defeat a guy called Cyborg. (I did tell him I might be able to beat up Sy Berg, the gym’s accountant, but most likely not Cyborg.) However, what I do, and I strongly recommend dads do this too, is find the thing you’re good at and focus on that skill when asked if you can beat someone in something you clearly cannot. When Felix asks me who would win in a fight, King Kong or me, I tell him King Kong would most likely win in a fistfight…”BUT, I can throw a frisbee way farther than him”. So the kid is kinda impressed with that and then we move on. “Dad, can you beat Cyborg in an arm-wrestling match?” “No, I can’t, but I can serve a wicked ace to the ad side of a tennis court. Can Cyborg do that? No, he can’t. He probably can’t even get it into the deuce court.” “Wow, you’re the best, Dad!” “I know I am, son. I know”
Other friends with kids are not that into how stupendous we think our kids are, and friends without kids are certainly not interested in another dad bloviating about another cool thing their kid did yesterday that really wasn’t cool at all. So, except for my mother, his nana, who thinks her grandson is beyond the greatest kid/ model/ actor/ bouncer/ astronaut /Mr. Universe /philosopher /economist /rapper/ political pundit….ever, most friends and family are fine hearing a funny anecdote once in a while of me trying to explain to Felix what a payphone is. I usually keep the hilarity of Felix’s antics to myself. I enjoy writing this because getting it down on paper and out of my congested brain is cathartic. A kid’s process of logic hurts a 46-year-old’s brain.
Felix seems to get the joke. He doesn’t always understand the joke or why things blow my mind, but he certainly knows when a reaction from me is coming and he loves to stir it up. Nothing is more enticing than his loco dad who can’t fathom how a line of questioning can start with “What is the difference between AM and PM?” and end with “How many times have you worn overalls in your life?” Yes, the same string of questions. It started with the former and ended with the latter…like a messed up game of operator, how the hell could it have gone from that to this? Sometimes you have to let the seemingly absurd thought process just be and not try to figure it all out. Felix is 7 and I am old. I try to absorb the exuberance of his logic and apply it to my middle-aged cantankerous self, but I also know when to leave it alone and just bask in his child wonderment.
I should leave the parenting advice to the real adults. Me giving parenting tips is a bit like Coach Bobby Knight hosting a sensitivity training seminar. Por ejemplo: Yesterday we were in the car, and as I do, I couldn’t control myself because of idiot traffic. So instead of displaying an ounce of composure and explaining to Felix that adults can get very frustrated in traffic, I chose to act out my default rant about how traffic is a conspiracy by Big Government to keep the man (Dave Raphael) down. I also may have mumbled under my breath that everyone on the road is high on crack. Pretty sure he didn’t hear that part. I don’t know, maybe he did. If he did hear it, no worries, he knows crack is wack. I taught him that classic 1980’s fun fact. Instead of making traffic frustration an opportunity to practice a bit of compassion and patience, I just tell him he can swear all he wants until the traffic dies down. My dumb logic on this, I surmise, is that if he starts swearing too it may alleviate my shame for throwing another temper tantrum in front of him. This is not a responsible parenting technique. Not even a little bit. He asks me why I tell him to always be respectful to others but I never do it when we’re driving. I told him that’s all out the window once we get in the car and no further explanation is given. When I do give him the green light to swear he never accepts that olive branch and refuses to curse. So maybe my incidental reverse psychology psychobabble crap inadvertently may have had a positive effect. Maybe I’m on to something, but probably not.
This is my favorite question. I belly-laughed at its ridiculousness and then I had to actually think about it. I immediately was like, “C’mon, of course Pilgrims know 1+1”, but then I was like, “Do they know 1+1?”. You know when you forget how to spell a real easy word and the more you think about it the more difficult it seems to become. The correct spelling begins to get farther and farther away from you until you have to sheepishly ask your buddy how to spell “who”. I know, for sure, that Pilgrims understand the concept of one of something added to another of something is two of something, but do they know the math? Was the word “add” invented yet? How about the term “math”? I can’t definitively say with the dismissive confidence I initially declared to Felix when he asked. Did Pilgrim kids write down 1+1=2 in school and solve it? Did they go to school? I should at least know if they went to school, man. I grew up in Massachusetts, ground zero for all things Pilgrims. Every kid in Massachusetts should know the Pilgrim’s backstory ‘cause we were forced to go on annual field trips to Plymouth Rock. It was the Massachusetts school system’s version of a yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. Except this yearly pilgrimage was to see actual pilgrims. And as you probably guessed, It was wicked boring. And when you read “wicked boring”, I need you to read it with a wicked strong Boston accent, Got it? Thanks, pal.
Like students in San Antonio going to the Alamo each year or Canadians visiting a frozen pond; if you grew up in Massachusetts, you went to Plymouth Rock. It’s what you did. A Plymouth Rock Pilgrim re-enactment was a 4-hour experience, which is 3.5 hours longer than it should have been. I’m sure during this arduous excursion, they must have gone over the Pilgrim kid’s learning situation. Is calling them “Pilgrim kids” even socially acceptable or is it a pejorative term? I assume it’s fine considering there haven’t been any Pilgrims or kids of Pilgrims around in hundreds of years, but who knows what’s acceptable these days. Am I going to be “canceled” for using the term “Pilgrim kid”? It would be great if I became an internet sensation for being known as the guy who lost his job for saying “Pilgrim kid”.
I know Pilgrims understand what 1+1 is. If a Pilgrim steals one piece of land from an indigenous Native American tribe and then takes another piece of land from a different Indian tribe, they now have two pieces of land. Pilgrims understand that. They comprehend that one piece of land plus another piece of land is two (stolen) pieces of land. So, in conclusion, do Pilgrims know 1+1? I think so. Who would think of such a ludicrous question? (Felix) Why would he think of that? (God knows) And what kind of nut would hyperfocus on it and write a damn essay about it? (Me)
Another reason the Pilgrim inquiry is my favorite is due to the urgent manner in which it was asked. We finished a seemingly never-ending 1980’s-style WWF wrestling match. It had bridge chair smashing and tights and illegal Kabuki dust blown into my eyes. Felix even constructed a steel cage somehow. He can’t put his socks on but he sourced materials to make a “cage-o-death” in the living room. It ended with me losing by submission from a figure four. What a fight. I told him I was taking a shower and needed a well-deserved break and not to disturb me unless the house was burning down. Kids love entering the sacred bathroom sector when a parent is in there. I told him not to come in unless one of his limbs was falling off. Within 8 seconds of delivering that message I see a little silhouette-o of a boy (scaramouch scaracmouch, will you do the Fandango!), outside the shower curtain…like a mini Anthony Perkins from Psycho. I tell him it better be important and he says something to the effect of “Man, it’s so important it’s going to blow you away”. I know what he thinks is mindblowing information is not even close to mindblowing, but maybe he has something this time that is not completely unimportant. Then he hits me with the “Do Pilgrims Know 1+1?” In his mind a totally appropriate reason for bum-rushing the bathroom. He genuinely thought I would be so appreciative that he picked the bathroom lock to tell me this most crucial news of the day. I wasn’t as “appreciative” of the intrusion then. I am now. He was right and didn’t even know it, it did end up blowing me away.
I love the weird, kooky questions, as well as the questions that appear to be nonsensical but, upon further review, are not that nonsensical. I hope this gibberish can spark more appreciation in parents for their own kid’s far-out thought patterns and fun way of looking at the world. I originally just wanted to write down some of my favorite questions from Felix but I rambled on a bit. I’ll wrap it up, I hear the orchestra starting to play me off. And it’s Felix with a violin. It sounds horrible. I’ll just leave this list here for you. Without further ado:
Hey, Dad….I got a question:
-Why is it called jogging?
-Is it better to be a baby or a whale? (not a baby whale – a human baby or a whale) -Is laughing healthy? If you laugh a lot does that mean you’re smart?
-Is it too late for me to have a twin brother?
-Can I drive and you sit in the back seat from now on?
-What is Godzilla? How did he come from? (not where, but how)
-Do I have a chin?
IMPORTANT FART QUESTIONS:
- What happens if you fart and burp at the same time? Is it like unlocking a superpower from a video game?
- Do you remember which fart of mine you liked the best? (Like a fart from a specific date in time over the last 7 years? I think that’s what he wants to know)
-What’s better, sitting down or standing up?
-Do you know Steve?
-How come every adult in their car picks their nose at a red light? If they all do it, how come I can’t? -I have been “jinxing” the cartoons on TV all week, don’t they owe me a coke?
Have a good night everyone, I’m taking a nap…