Dad Smart
My dad has been many things in his life, most of them involved somehow with using tools. He graduated high school sometime a long time ago and went to work at an electric company; he tried college for a year but liked making money more, so he quit and kept working. When I was a kid, his employment ranged from working for the county school system to building houses to fishing (although not in a professional capacity). He’s not a big reader, although he’ll plow through a book if the subject is interesting enough. He’s a pretty sharp guy – my aunt told me he took hard-ass math classes like trigonometry for fun in high school, so we are extremely dissimilar in that and many other respects – but by his own admission he is not, as they say, a rocket surgeon.
However, he answered every oddball question I had as a child (Why is the sky blue? Why do we need spiders?) with a casual assurance that led me to believe that those were simply answers that you acquired along the road in life without much trouble. I just took that to mean you just eventually knew some things without being able to remember where you learned them from.
Now I am older, I have a college degree and a place in the world and I don’t know shit. If it weren’t for Google Maps, I may not be able to get home from work every day. I’m trying to learn new stuff all the time, but it seems like I’m forgetting all the other stuff. So it really annoys me, as a scholar and a ‘gentleman’, that a guy who wasn’t much interested in either of those things knows so damn much.
My saving grace is that I haven’t had a child yet.
Much like I’ve seen many an Average Joe turn into the Incredible Hulk once they have children (DAD SMASH! will be a fun catchphrase) and can start lifting the car with one hand to change a tire, I’m hoping there’s such a thing as Dad Smart. I don’t know if there will be a test or a study-guide, but I’m blindly assuming that somewhere along the way of fatherhood somebody gives you a manual with all the answers, to be consulted as needed. Maybe it’s handed down, generation to generation, with space left in the margins to account for questions a new generation of youngsters might ask – in this day and age, I’m excited to have to list all the reasons why a future child shouldn’t show off his genitals on Twitter even though some people find it a good political move.
It would also be cool if every one of these situations was Rain Man moment, where a kid asked a question and you instinctively gave the right answer without even knowing it. I think if I was going to have that ability, it would’ve presented itself at some point before now, but maybe I’m wrong.
All that said, it’s likely that the next generation of kids won’t ask questions anymore – I don’t think I’ve asked anyone a question about anything since Google became a part of my life. If they do, I’ll have a phone at my fingertips ready to search my way to intelligence. Kinda like carrying around an encyclopedia, although not as bulky nor as accurate.
Shut Up and Listen 