A Dad’s Quest to Answer His Son’s Questions
This excerpt was featured on The Today Show
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Wendell Jamieson sought to answer the some of the more bizarre questions asked by his elementary school-age son, Dean, and got carried away. The result was a book, "Father Knows Less." Here's an excerpt:
1. Why?
I remember the white-hot highway, the exploding chrome highlights of the other cars, the blast of humid air through the open windows. But most of all, I remember the roar of the road.
Our blue Volkswagen station wagon had no air conditioner. The engine was in the back, not under the hood, so it vibrated and heated up the rear seats where my sister and I sat, lap belts loose around our waists. We didn't have much to do back there-this was before Walkmans or iPods or portable DVD players, and the whipping wind violently fanned the pages of any book we tried to open-so we just sautéed in silent misery. Outside, Long Island flew by like a freight train, the summer sun burning away all the textures of the world and turning each receding line of trees and houses a lighter shade of green-gray.
I must have been five. With nothing else to do, I began to daydream.
This can be dangerous.
I didn't think about our destination, the little brown house on stilts we rented near the beach on Dune Road. Nor did I look forward to playing in the sand, or in the bay, or watching the sailboats glide beneath the drawbridges that connected Dune Road with the mainland. And I didn't ruminate on the horseshoe crabs I'd see crawling along the silt, even though, unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, they are among the most bizarre and fascinating creatures on earth.
I thought about something else.
Why was the road so incredibly noisy? Where was the sound coming from? How can wind make noise? It's just air, -invisible air, moving fast, right? And in this case, the air wasn't even moving-the car was. So why was the highway so loud?
I leaned forward and shouted to my father. I may have had to do this a few times to be heard.
"Daddy, why is the highway so loud?"
Here is what he said:
"Because all the people who live next to the road have their vacuum cleaners on."
I knew vacuums were noisy; I thought of ours at home, thundering along the rug. Then I imagined one blasting away in every other house and made some careful sonic calculations in my head. His answer made perfect sense. I leaned back, satisfied, returning to my spot in the wind tunnel.
Cut to Christmas morning, a few years later:
We lived in a brownstone row house in a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Park Slope. We always had very nice Christmases here, both before my parents got divorced and after. My sister, Lindsay, and I would get up in the milky early--morning light, retrieve our bulging stockings from the mantelpiece and spill them out on our beds. We'd tally everything up. Then we'd get our parents through the glass-paneled doors that separated our rooms and drag them, groggy but game, downstairs to the tree.
But this year was different. Lindsay had lost a tooth on Christmas Eve and placed it beneath her pillow. The first thing she did when she got up was look to see if the tooth was still there, even before retrieving her stocking. And it was.
"Daddy," she called, bursting angrily through those glass-paneled doors, her feet stomping. "Daddy, wake up. The tooth fairy didn't come. My tooth is still there. There's no money under my pillow. Why didn't the tooth fairy come?"
Here is what he said:
"She got run over by Santa Claus's sleigh."
My mother laughed. My sister did not.
Children ask questions; that's a fact. For someone whose age is in the low to mid single digits, the world is a blank slate waiting to be asked about, every long-held assumption and familiar sight to a tired adult an intriguing and potentially fascinating mystery. And every answer can beget a new question, until parent and child are locked in that final single-word checkmate: "Why?"
Every parent, I imagine, has his or her own technique for dealing with this phenomenon. Some improvise, some turn to the dictionary, some go online, some say, "Ask your father," or "Ask your mother." Some just shrug and say, "I don't know"-a phrase that would seem like a surefire way to end the process but can be surprisingly ineffective. My father, on the road or in the bed on Christmas morning, liked to make things up. This wasn't necessarily because he didn't know the answers, or that he found the questions annoying, or that he was drunk. It just seemed to amuse him, giving funny answers. My mother laughed along, too-hey, Wendell, you didn't really think everyone by the side of the road had a vacuum on, did you?
I was twenty-two, driving down the Long Island Expressway in my own un-air-conditioned Volkswagen, when suddenly it hit me: I'd been duped.
Of course, my father didn't always make stuff up. Sometimes he thoughtfully tried to explain the world, even when it was scary.
I was watching the news one evening in the living room. I did this every night: even today I can recall the twin sensations-audio and tactile-of hearing Walter Cronkite's voice ("And that's the way it is_._._.") while wearing footie pajamas. My cousins from North Carolina used to say I was a weirdo, always watching the news, but I was entranced. On this particular evening, with my parents entertaining neighbors in the kitchen, the stories and pictures were especially fascinating: war in the Middle East. A very pale-looking man, speaking slowly and with apparent pain, appeared on the screen. He described being tortured. He said electrodes had been attached to his testicles.
"Daddy," I screamed. "WHAT ARE TESTICLES?"
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You can read the rest of this article about Wendell Jamieson here.