Teenagers’ questions with no answers

I don’t have a Chronicle email address. This isn’t a complaint because my brain doesn’t have room for one more password. But the upshot is that when I’m forwarded the emails — sometimes on the same day, sometimes within a few weeks, sometimes in clumps (like the day I got 812) — I make a point of answering all missives, from my citizen’s email address. A few people, like Jean Sward, reply over and over and become extended family because, God knows, my sons Zane and Aidan can use a few more aunts and uncles.

Jean wrote to find out what I meant last week about “teenagers asking questions that have no answer.” You’d have to live with Aidan full time to get it. Try driving him to school. It takes about 45 minutes for his medication to kick in so in that one short drive to St. John’s School he sits in the back seat, just waiting until Brian is about to curse out a driver/pedestrian/traffic light when he queries, “Who’s faster: the Flash or God?”

Other questions while driving in the Kipcap:

“Do jail buses have emergency exits?” (Asked upon seeing the Sheriff ’s Department bus driving up Interstate 280 north.)

“Does a hearse get to use the carpool lane?”

Now, sometimes he asks a question like, “What’s the dive speed of a peregrine falcon?” when he knows the answer (200 mph). He’s sitting there with the book. But he asks to find out whether his Dad is still omniscient. So I answer with a question myself, “How could the boy who couldn’t read his one assigned chapter of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ possibly be able to memorize ‘The Encyclopedia of Raptors’?”

Some questions are judgments. Since June 25, when our beloved Bravo’s closed its doors for the last time, I’ve been unable to enter another pizza parlor. We got as far as Little Joe’s, right across the street, and I couldn’t make my foot walk through the door. Aidan put his arm on my shoulder: “I guess we’re not ready to move on?”

His followup question, when the delivery man arrived, was, “Why do they put round pizza into a square box?” The answer: They ran out of triangles.

Some questions are just random. At the Century 20 movie theater: “Which armrest is yours?”

We’d gone to Hollister in the Serramonte Mall to get a birthday present for his friend (son of SASB) and as the clerk rang up an overpriced ombre shirt, she asked, “Would you like us to put you on the mailing list?” I demurred, “This really isn’t my style.” To which she persisted, “We put grandparents on all the time.”

I probably could have borne that until Aidan queried, “Daddy if you were a couch, would you be an antique?” followed, a little more soberly by, “Daddy, are you old enough to die of old age?”

“If a clowder jumps on top of each other, is it still a dogpile?” In case you’re wondering about that clowder term (it means a group of cats), he also memorized the collective nouns for predators.

In a library, “Do they put the bible in the fiction or nonfiction section?”

Some questions must have an answer but need a brighter person than Daddy: “If the antonym of synonym is antonym, what is the synonym for synonym?”

Aidan does not ask rhetorical questions, which to him means that the asker doesn’t really expect to hear an answer, e.g.. “Who put all the pencils in the microwave?” No, he leaves that to Daddy. Instead he asks, unrhetorically, “What is the term for a question that has no answer?”

I asked Crazy Mike this, and he said, “There is no such thing as a question that has no answer. All questions, like all prayers, have an answer.” Sister Lil (her rap name is Lil Sister) responded to that: “God always answers prayers, but humans don’t always listen.”

Aidan persists: “Why do you keep telling me not to take candy from strangers but let me go trickortreating?”

“What is the speed of dark?”

“If we make angel cake, do angels make people cake?”

“If the package on a stick of gum says 50 calories per piece, is that for chewing the gum or swallowing it?”

Aidan shakes his head when I cannot answer, and I can only quote Mark Twain, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could barely stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

“Why do you keep telling me not to take candy from strangers but let me go trickortreating?”