I have strong recollections of a few times in my childhood where I realized I had started to learn things, started to know things that my parents didn’t know! It was exhilarating, almost like I’d pulled a fast one on them, like I’d gotten away with something sinister.

But as I get older, and as my parents and grandparents age, I’m starting to care less about the things I know that they don’t, and more about the things they know that I don’t.

I wish it were an inevitability of being a child that you knew everything your parents did. I wish that all the knowledge they’d gained in a lifetime was yours automatically, a genetic right.

I hate to think of all the things my parents will never teach me, and in turn all the things that I’ll never get a chance to teach my son.