World's #1 Dad

What do you tell a child when she comes to you with that certain question? My youngest, Beep Nut, came bounding over to me yesterday as I sat by the fire in my evening chair, leafing through the latest issues of Grit, The Saturday Evening Post, and Late Nineteen-Forties Parenting.

“Daddy,” Beep Nut said to me, her eyes all a-swim in youthful innocence, “where does the eye go when somebody loses an eye?”

So I sat her down and quickly tried to figure out what a caring father world do when his youngest inquires about things she just doesn’t need to know about for years and years. Well, I consider myself a bit of a progressive (I was one of the first to allow my children to marry at the ages of 7 and 9, respectively), and so I went out on a limb and told Beep Nut the simple truth about the Island of Lost Eyes. The thing is, I really don’t have that much hard information about it, and frankly, I think I made a bit of a botch of it. To be honest, I hadn’t expected any follow-up questions. Now I actually find myself wondering about certain aspects of the story. How indeed are the eyes encased during the ship’s seven-year journey---individually or in groups? What sort of security and record-keeping measures are in place so that the eyes are easily sorted and stacked by the lonely spirits of Scotland’s greatest rugby stars on the other end? And what if---God forbid---they ever decided to shut the island down and return all those eyes across the Hudson River at once? No tax base in the world could support the construction of cloud-scraping eye-storage towers of a vastness to match those on the island!

Jesus, honey, we should really sit down sometime and talk about this. We’ve been married for eleven years and there’s some things we just have to hash out, if only for the good of the kids. Here’s a good place for us to start, and I’m quite serious about getting a straight answer to this one: what exactly is your home address?