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Larkin

Posted March 4, 2009

I recall a night when Larkin was still an infant, and I'd just come back from a trip to Ireland. Lying awake at 5 a.m., I noticed it was not yet light outside, whereas in Ireland it had been light by 4 a.m. -- and still light at 9:30 p.m.. So we had 15 hours of summer daylight here in New England, versus 18 in northern Europe. I lay there wondering, Could I explain this?

This is the kind of worry you get when you have children for the first time, and you anticipate their questions.

I'm not a medieval person, so in theory I knew that the differential-sunlight phenomenon has to do with the way the earth revolves around the sun. Its orbit. Or wait. Did it have to do with the way the earth rotates on its axis? Uh-oh. Galileo and Copernicus writhed in their graves at the mess I was making of their glorious discoveries.

Larkin at that point was only a year old, so I had some time to catch up with a millennium of scientific knowledge. But somehow, other things got in the way. And now, two years later, the questions have begun.

What is fire? Why do people die? If you burn ice, what will happen?

I'm coping, but barely. For instance, Larkin is very interested in metabolism and digestion -- where food comes from and where it goes. Here's what we've got down so far: You eat the food, it goes into your stomach, your body takes the energy out of it, and what it doesn't use, comes out of you as poop. That's OK. But can I take my answer game to the next level? How, exactly, does your body take the energy out? And what is energy?

Oops! As the old Monty Python routine said, I was only hoping you wouldn't ask that question!

Isn't it hilarious, how little we actually, really know? I can deal with, "Where does the water in the tub come from, Daddy?" (reservoir, pipes, faucet). When we get onto "What is electricity?", however, or "Where does blood come from?", things get dodgy pretty fast. To be sure, I am a fiction writer. But you feel guilty, simply fabricating things to your child. Or, at least, you should feel guilty. Or at least nervous. Tell her the moon is an enormous flashlight, and she'll believe you for a while. But somewhere down the line will come a great reckoning.

Of course, Descartes himself would tremble, Kant would cut and run, under the barrage of Whys a three-year-old unlooses on you. It's bad enough already with Larkin, and it's only going to get worse. Looking down the road, I can see that parenthood is going to be like school all over again, only this time you haven't studied. My sister, who has three kids, recently called to complain that she'd been dragooned into a contest at her daughter's school called Are You Smarter than Your 8-Year-Old? "I can just see it," she hissed. "They're going to ask things like, 'What is the hardest element?' and I'm going to feel like the biggest dunce."

I reminded her that our late mother believed that when you don't know something, you should answer twice as loud. "So just shout, 'titanium!'" I told her.

Sometimes I'll give Larkin an answer I know is bogus, letting her chase her tail in some closed loop of circular definitions, because I'm too tired to explain something. But such devious rhetorical ploys come back to bite you. Larkin and I were driving in the neighborhood when she asked why some people still had Christmas decorations on their houses. I said they were probably just too lazy to take them down. Then I asked her, "Honey, do you know what 'lazy' means?" Silence. I gave her some help: "Do you know what kinds of things a lazy person might do?"

"Yes!" she said. "He doesn't take his decorations down!"

I looked back in the mirror. Was that a gleam of satisfied irony in her eye?

Ultimately, of course, life and wisdom are not merely a game of trivial pursuit; and the hope is to get beyond the facts to the underlying meaning, the connectivity, the flow, while harnessing all the human intelligences, in a Howard Gardner kind of way, so that learning for your child becomes not some mere recitation, but a living, breathing process of discovery.

Meanwhile, there are questions to answer, and the Great Pretender needs to buff up his game. So... out in the kitchen I take a grapefruit in one hand and send a clementine into orbit around it, rotating as it goes. Revolving, I see now, is what gives us seasons, while rotation yields day and night. The rotation moreover occurs around an invisible line through the center of Clementine Earth -- the axis! -- and that line is tilted. I picture a spot near the top. As it rotates on its 24-hr cycle, it remains pointed toward the sun, and so gets a lot of light. Summer in Ireland! Further down, the U.S. gets less sun--and a shorter day.

I have just perfectly recapitulated a fifth-grade science demonstration. Phew. It is a lot of work. Now, Larkin, will you please ask me about it, and let the Great Pretender be, at least for one shining moment, the Great Explainer?