Tonight we are chatting under a waning crecent and eerie, green luminescence of five-pointed stickies.

“Can we play our question game again, Daddy?” She asks, tucked tightly into bed, throttling the helpless plush doll — her inseparable Lucy — under the crook of her arm.

“Do you have some questions ready?” I ask. I’m tracing my fingers lightly across her forehead to brush the hair from her eyes. “Good questions?”

She nods.

One could hardly call it creative brilliance in the art of game design, but as far as parenting tactics it has been nothing short of a sleeper hit. The Girl loves it despite — or perhaps because — that the rules are so ridiculously simple: she can ask me three questions, no more and no less, about absolutely any thought, idea or curiosity that happens to be cluttering her little mind — and I will answer her as honestly and thoroughly as I my own cluttered mind can muster. That’s it. That’s our game.

“Alright then.” I prompt. “What’s your first question?”

“Uhhhh…” She scrunches her face into her impression of deep thought, draws the moment out for a few seconds longer and finally asks: “What is a light bulb made out of?”

“A light bulb? Well…” I type the query into my mental search engine, cross-reference with a few glances around the room for the likely culprit light bulb that had instigated the question, all-the-while stalling with a few more verbal space-fillers such as “that’s a good question” and “let me think for a moment.”

This game of ours has yet to become the inevitable revision of “three questions to stump Daddy” into which it is likely to evolve as the months or years reveal the limits of this father’s knowledge. As of now The Girl still expects a comprehensible solution from her old man. And as such, my challenge remains to translate something relatively complex into something relatively elementary, or at least simple enough for a four-year-old to grasp. “Well…” I repeat before launching into an improvised analogy, crudely comparing my understanding of her fixture’s incandescent lights to a glass bubble adorned by some metal bits inside and out that get hot and bright when electricity is put to them.

It seems to have satisfied her curiosity and she replies with a concise “yup” when I ask her if my reply answered her question.

“Do you have another question?”

She nods and her eyes fix to the far side of her bedroom. “Why did you buy me a duck?” She asks, referring to the yellow, duck-shaped humidifier we bought once when she was sick and which now perches patiently and permanently atop her clothes dresser.

“What? You already know why I bought it.” I frown and shrug, immediately scolding myself with an bit of internal reproach at my breaking the rules of our game. In the moment these questions appear, questions to which I’m perfectly certain there resides an answer in her little brain, I fumble. Later, such as when I’m recollection, remembering, or writing events into indelicate prose, it occurs that asking questions to which she already knows the answer might just be a test of me, her dad, and my honesty in playing by our rules. Or, perhaps, it is a verfication of her own brain: a feedback loop of memory and moment and whatever passes for the unconscious fact-checking of critical thoughts in a four-year-old’s mind. Either way, I should be more proud and instead of scoffing just keep playing our game. I am certainly sighing as I answer: “It’s supposed to help you sleep when you’re sick, right? And you were sick one day, so…” I say, then immediately wonder to myself if perhaps I should do a little more research into the medical validity of that practice.

But she is satisfied, nods, and scrunches her face one more time, seeming to be physically squeezing the question from the depths of her grey matter.

“One more question, okay?” I prompt.

“Okay.” A pause, her eyes focusing then, almost sadly: “Daddy? Why don’t my wishes come true?”

A moment of cold silence, then I chuckle to myself, thinking that this deep-dark-and-skeptical explosion has dropped as if a boss-battle at the end of a particularly epic dungeon in the latest RPG I’ve been playing.

Immediately my mind flickers between two scenes.

The first of these scenes occurs some week-night eve no more than a few days prior, the icy air fogged by our hot breath as I opened the garage door and try to bustle The Girl into the car so we could get driving to some now-forgotten location. There is a beauty that comes with really cold evenings, the skin-numbing air chilled to twenty or thirty degrees below zero, when the dim lights of our suburban home are not quite enough to wash out too many of the stars as they peak through the pitch black sky. She is facing down the cold, toque pulled down over her ears, and her lips are chanting furiously into the frozen air at the breach of the open maw and relative warmth of the garage facing into the city street. I could not quite hear, but I was almost certain the mantra went something like “Star light, star bright. First star…”

The second scene is older — old, but not ancient — and musty from two years of cold storage in the recesses of my pop-culture-peppered memory. The scene, fragmented and certainly less clear than a Google search, is simply this: a quote, deliberately planted in my mind while watching the recent Disney film The Princess and the Frog. The protagonist as an at-the-time young girl, wishing on a star from her bedroom window, is coached by her thoughtful and pragmatic father with the words: “Yes, you wish and you dream with all your little heart. But you remember, Tiana, that old star can only take you part of the way. You got to help him with some hard work of your own.” It had, watching the blu-ray while cuddled up on the couch with The Girl, struck me as quotable, particularly as I was still deep in the throes of my rational dad-li-ness — and also given the source. And I recall archiving — complete with the appropriate keywords and metadata — that particular sentiment into my own grey matter for later reference.

“Did you wish for something that didn’t come true?” I ask.

“Uh, huh.” The Girl nods, tucking her chin into her covers, a tearful frown forming on her face.

“What did you wish for?” I ask, breaking the cardinal rule of childhood wishing — never tell your wishes to anyone — and simultaneously stepping outside the looser rules of our three-question game.

She looks at me, half-frowning, half-ridiculing as if I should know better: “I can’t tell.” The Girl says matter-of-fact.

“I see.” I lean back, and glance up at the plastic moon hanging from her bedroom wall and the plastic stars stuck to the ceiling — all the while wishing my own wish that little girls asked questions about lunar eclipses and supernovae rather than magic and wishes. But then I know better, right? I take a deep breath and, ever so carefully, take my plodding jab at pragmatic fathering. “Well, you know,” I say, starting what is destined to be a long and delicate explanation under a waning crecent moon and eerie, green luminescence of five-pointed plastic stickies. “Wishes, they sometimes need a little help getting going…”

It’s only a bit of honey after all, but: “Daddy.” She bleats. “Oh! *gasp* No!” And an exasperated and futile attempt to wipe the spill with fingers even stickier than the mess itself ensues.

“It’s just your pajamas. Wait.” I sigh, pulling a damp cloth from the nearby sink and — smudging-more-than-cleaning — dab the honey from the cartoon visage of some Disney princess emblazoned in fleece fabric. “Wait. Stop touching it.”

“In Syria today,” the news informs us “twelve protesters are confirmed dead after…”

Lately, my mind flutters with a variety of philosophical thoughts related to the parsing of complex language and complex ideas. How much can a kid really understand and how much more can they comprehend? What do they get out of things that they hear? Anecdotally, the art of reading stories aloud and observing the reactions of a little girl I know oh-so-well has revealed to me a definite threshold of understanding: there is a line in the snow — marked by a speed of my talking, the number of syllables in words and sentences and the density and abstraction of the concepts being read — where-after I may as well be reciting everything in pig-Latin for all the comprehension that is going on. But that line is increasingly more vague and more distant.

And we’ve always just listened to the news at breakfast. It’s just what we do. At least, really… just what I do.

“Can I share your toast?” She asks, her question trailing off in that this-isn’t-really-a-question-way that four-year-olds love so much. “You know how I like to share your toast sometimes?”

“You have your own toast.”

“Mine is drippy.” She sighs.

“It’s fine. Eat your own toast.” I notice my voice is finally getting that father-knows-best firmness to it. (It’s only taken four years.)

“…when the euro fell to a new, sixteen-month low against the US dollar…” The radio continues.

“Dad, what does ‘fell’ mean?” The Girl asks without giving the slightest indication that her full attention is no longer completely on her half-eaten toast. Her eyes focus on the bread as she nibbles another bite from a randomly selected corner of the morsel, but she awaits my answer. I know this. It’s happened countless times before. It will happen countless times again.

She’s always asked a lot of questions, but — like that line of comprehension drawn ever so vaguely in the snow — the line of inquisition upon my fatherly knowledge reaches even further: the questions are more and more abstract. I’m less often defining things or places. I’m more often tripping over quickly improvised explanations of ideas or concepts. And as such she absorbs knowledge and ideas — definitions for hundreds of new things — like moisture into a thirsty sponge. There is an icy firmament upon which I’ve been bashed even harder, however.

“You know,” I shrug, making it up as I go along. “It’s like when you are standing or walking… and then you trip… and you fall down. Then you say would ‘I fell.’” I’m met with a blank expression. I pause and reconsider. “I think they were talking about money.” I offer, taking a different tack.

“Oh.” She says. Another nibble of toast disappears into her mouth.

To say that this level of acute comprehension tosses me about somewhat in the blizzard of fatherhood would be a gross understatement. Instead, it hurls me into a glacial freeze of my confidence. It is not what I’d expected. It’s not the “why is the sky blue” kind of question that they teach you about in that imaginary as-seen-on-television daddy-school. Because I know my answer was too simple for her. I know she is getting the context of the ideas she hears — at least most of the time — but I don’t want to make those kinds of assumptions in my own explanations.

I had told her what the word “fall” means and in return I get an “are you a moron, Daddy?” look from a four-year-old who comprehends enough of the context to see that my answer was not satisfactory for the question she was asking. “Fell” obviously had a different meaning just then than the one she already knew.

“…and a collision on thirty-fourth avenue has traffic diverted to one lane in both directions…” The radio announcer proclaims to the upbeat rift of the traffic-report background music.

The Girl asks: “Can we go sledding tonight?”

I wince. We had gone sledding on the past weekend. The effort involved in wrapping ourselves from head-to-toe in winter-proof gear and trekking to the local hill barely worth the six top-to-bottom slides by the Girl before opting to go home. And, it was ten degrees warmer then. Why doesn’t she understand this? I wonder to myself.

“Really? It’s very cold outside.” I reply.

“It’s minus thirty.” She says, then her brow furls ever-so-slightly and she asks: “What does ‘minus’ mean?”

I react like the answer-ninja leaping from behind a snowbank. But… what does ‘minus’ mean? My brain races and flips through a half-dozen too-complicated explanations. I have this notion of mathematical quantity and an abstract concept of negative numbers in my mind. Though it’s not as if I can count out negative thirty coins or spoons and show them — physically manipulate them on the table — to the waiting sponge-mind of my daughter. Instead, I deflect. I look at her suspiciously and then ask. “How did you know that it’s minus thirty outside?”

“I don’t know.” She says, matter-of-factually and then reconsiders shrugging in her too-fast, kid-like imitation of a shrug. “It said.”

“The radio said?” I ask, assuming.

“Yeah.” She replies and takes another tiny bite of her toast.

“When?” I challenge.

“Daddy!” She scrunches her face, gapes a honey-smeared maw in my direction and sighs audibly. I don’t know where exactly she’s picked up this particular expression, but I’m virtually certain it’s the four-year-old equivalent of rolling her eyes in utter exasperation at the density of my aging mind. She pats my arm in mock consolation. “It just said.”

“Alright.” My wounded dad-ego concedes, opting instead to retaliate with a dose of logic before offering the solution to the query. “But, just so you know, ‘minus’ means its cold and ‘minus thirty’ means it’s really cold. So, we’re not going sledding tonight.”

She sets her toast gingerly on the plate, still managing to dribble a few more stray globs of honey onto the edge of the table, and looks me in the eyes with her doe-like gaze. “Can we go sledding tomorrow?”

Once, this blog tried to take itself more seriously. It worked for a while. The author, after all, was simply trying to write about his life in a way that reflected his values and beliefs within the framework of opinion and analysis. Then it stopped working. Or, at least, it stopped being fun. And that was never the point.

This blog has been reloaded: Same author, but different framework.

Life, after all, is rarely about opinion and analysis, but is often about the tiny accomplishments and the lessons we learn from those accomplishments as we play — ahem, live — our lives. These little achievements don’t win us awards, are rarely noted, and are often overlooked. This is not a bad thing either. It just is. But, as much as I am a scientifically-minded geek, I am also a sappy, narrative-inclined writer. And this new format is much more in line with me sharing a message, sharing a metaphor, and sharing a story.

The gaming stuff amuses me and I hope it amuses you — and it’s just in fun. The stories on the other hand are non-fiction, and hopefully those entertain you, too.

So, from this point on, it I’ll be telling you a story. It goes something like this:

There was this family…