Daughter and a friend, aged six and eight,
Were discussing something fun, a trick
One of them had learned how to do, while
In the back of the car on the way to school,
When somehow they turned metaphysical.
Daughter, who can barely read at all as yet
And who had just minutes earlier offered
Her pedagogical proposal that school should
Be held every other day and not every day
(Like her father, pathologically predisposed
To loathe anything extending too relentlessly
Into the foreseeable future [as a gifted child
Her age who adored books, lived for reading,
I was nonetheless horrified and stricken
By the realization one morning in first grade
That I would have to attend school regularly
For at least another dozen years, twice
As long as my entire life to that point,
An unfathomable sentence of dull repetition]
And also, like her father, creatively inclined
To neatly, pragmatically doomed solutions),
Now observed "Nothing lasts forever, get it?"
She laughed. Her friend retorted, "So what?"
Daughter tried to explain her joke. "No,
Everyone knows it like that. I mean, 'nothing
Does last forever.' Nothing is something
That lasts forever!" Her driving father felt as
If she'd just lifted his wallet or had proven
The genetic determination of paronomastics..
"Now do you get it?" Her friend countered,
"Scientists say even something you think
Is nothing always really has something in it."
"I know," shrugged daughter, unimpressed.
"My hands look empty but they have air."
"Not just air." "Well, and chemicals." "Germs!
Every time you wave your hand you're
Pushing millions of germs around you can't
See." "Poor germs. Sorry I hit you. Too bad."
"So everything has something in it." "Yes...."
Triumphantly now, "So that's why nothing is
Nothing!" Wild peal of child laughter. QED.
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