Y107 | Your #1 Hit Music Station

• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

 

It freaked me out…

I look up to my parents – always have, always will. Even at 30 years old, I still call my parents for advice (I’m sure this isn’t a surprise to folks my age, but I thought that might catch some younger readers off-guard). I feel very lucky I still can. But…

 

I can remember when I was young – very young – and found out that I knew something that my Dad didn’t. This wasn’t a “maybe” situation, it was “for sure.” My mind was blown…

 

It wasn’t something in the field of “street smarts,” either. It was “book smarts” stuff. This is what impressed me so much. Sure, I knew current slang, cartoons, who the “druggies” were to avoid at school, and that the hairspray I was forced to use was uncool, but this was different. My teacher had taught it to me. I learned it and HE HAD NOT. I was stupefied…

 

Are you ready for what it was?

 

It’s pretty silly, looking back…

 

It was millimeters.

 

Yep millimeters. I remember helping my Dad with some sort of home-improvement project around age 8-ish. He ask for the sum of some random measurement, and I answered back that it was very small… “about 7 millimeters” (or something to that effect).

 

My Dad answered back, “What?”

 

My Dad – like most Dads, as I’ve come to find – is and was hard of hearing. A response of “What” to anything wasn’t unusual from my Dad.

 

(as a matter of fact, I used to make my Dad angry when I was a jerk-head teenager by saying something to my Dad, then immediately repeating myself before he could ask “what?” He would then ask when I was halfway through the repeated statement already. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaan that used to make him mad! Kids can be “a handful” as Mom would say!)

 

Anywhoooooo… after I repeated the measurement (in millimeters), my Dad explained that “we didn’t have millimeters when I was growing up.” He added, “That’s new.”

 

WHOA… hold the phone!

 

Now that I’m older, I know that adults sometimes (especially parents, when pride is involved) fib to kids to save face. I have no idea if it was true that millimeters were “new,” or if he just never learned about them and should have. It didn’t matter… I officially knew something – something from a book – that my Dad didn’t. I had to teach HIM.

 

My DAD! I used to go to my parents for help with my algebra! To proofread my papers on Abe Lincoln! They knew what an “atomic weight” meant when I didn’t!!

 

But not millimeters. Whoa.

 

WHOA.

 

It stopped me dead in my tracks, and I’ve never forgotten it.

 

Be nice, Mid-Missouri, but can you think of a moment like this from YOUR life? What’s something you knew, but your parent(s) did not?