Just Asking

I don’t know if all the coronavirus talk going around was the catalyst for the question, or if it was just something that was going to come up at some point no matter what. Some things are inevitable.

Art Linkletter made a dog-gone good living bringing the darndest things kids say to the American audiance's attention.

The question I’m referring to did come from a kid, which is encouraging in its own way. In a world changing faster than many of us can keep up with it’s comforting to know kids haven’t changed—at least those kids under the age of six or seven. They still say the darndest things.

I was having a conversation with my grandson—just talking about anything that came up. The planets. Pro wrestling. Fights with school bullies. We were all over the map, which is where we both like our conversations to go. He even commented that the two of us were “very similar” in that way, after asking the question in question.

He’s right. I’m ten years retired from my last real job, and he’s probably about a decade away from his first. We’ve both got time on our hands.

In the middle of our conversation, and it may have been the result of the crazy times we’re living in or it was something he thought up on the spur of the moment, he asked the question.

“Papa, how long do you think you’re gonna live?”

There really is no good answer to this question. He’s too old and too smart for me to say forever. Pulling an exact age out of the hat, regardless of what age I picked, was only going to open up a whole new can of more wormy questions.

Rather than pick an age, I just said, “I’m hoping for at least another month.” I said it in a way that let him know I was joking and that I planned on being around for a long time. I just couldn’t tell him how long.

The more I thought about this question, which I’ve thought about enough to tell this story several times, the more I realized that we often don’t give kids enough credit.

His question may have been unusual, even unexpected, or it may have been totally normal and to be expected. I’ve only been asked it once in the direct manner he posed it, but with seven grandkids, variations of this question have come up before.

The reality is, I’m 73 years old and he’s seven. If nothing else, his was a legitimate question.

So maybe kids don’t say the darndest things.

I started thinking about some of the things adults ask their kids. Darn it if they don’t say some of the darndest things, too—questions that don’t have easy answers.

“Who told you, you could do that?”

“What made you think you could get away with that?”

“What were you thinking?”

“What’s come over you?”

“What have you done?”

“What’s the big idea?”

Pretty much any question adults ask that begin with what is looking for an answer that doesn’t exist.

By the same token, “When are you going to grow up and start acting your age?” practically begs for the answer, “I dunno. Maybe in about a month.”

I’m searching for a good punch line to end this and haven’t come up with one. Given the subject matter, maybe I shouldn’t take any chances. I should just post it while I still can.