Week 95: 1969 Karmann Ghia Convertible

Racer A and I saw a Karmann Ghia a few weeks ago -- I remember because he asked what it was and now that I have told him, he'll squirrel away that acorn of information.


His brain collects trivia. I found an old postcard for my vintage shop the other day, a beauty of a colorized linen card.  As I was looking at it he asked what it was. "This is a vintage card of the Brooklyn Bridge."


"Oh. In New York City?" he asked.


It wasn't until later that it occurred to me the location of the Brooklyn Bridge might not be common knowledge to a pre-schooler outside of New York City, and trust me, Ohio is very much outside of New York City.


Such trivia, however is not evenly distributed or outwardly logical, and the danger to a dad is to assume he knows ... well, anything, really.  His world view is like a complex outline drawing, as in a coloring book, with specific parts of the picture, the shell of a turtle or the pom pom on a hat, meticulously colored, with other, larger areas still white.


What I mean is he might surprise me by remembering what a Venetian blind is or by understanding the electoral college (just kidding -- even he doesn't understand the electoral college), yet I'm having a difficult time getting him to accept that the level of darkness outside does not directly link to time and that bedtime is still bedtime even if it is light outside, and that we can eat lunch instead of dinner even if the sky is dark and black from a storm.  This might be a bad example, however, because you can't really color "time" but only its correlations to our senses, which, now that I think about it, he is doing. Maybe my coloring book analogy is better than I thought. Or maybe he's just trying to stay up later, which is probably more likely.

Those odd bits of trivia, however, are fun, and if I don't know how he came across many items of knowledge, I relish the unexpectedly random questions that I can identify as trivia gathering. What is a 'public' park?"  "Does a squirrel eat mint?" "What does the little 'k' mean on the cereal box?" "What is a 'sinus'?" "Why are most school buses yellow but  buses adults ride different colors?" 


I probably can only truthfully answer less than 50% of his questions, but the weirder the more enjoyable, and when I don't know an answer, I often try to find out the answer and get back to him, and I find that experience remarkably satisfying.


By the way: the little 'k' stands for "kosher," and gardeners say squirrels don't like mint.