As a holiday gift, I bought The Girl a light-up replica of the moon. It now hangs from a small nail on her bedroom wall. Its diameter is roughly thirty centimeters of textured, semi-translucent plastic and via a variety of functions on the included remote control can be selectively backlit to replicate eight phases of lunar illumination. Clicking her moon into just the right phase has become an indespensible part of our evening bedtime routine, fitting naturally and somewhere between the second of two storybook recitals and the charging-with-a-flashlight of the glow-in-the-dark stars clinging to her ceiling.

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…”