My son is sharper than I am

I remember as a kid knowing or remembering things that my parents didn't.  As a teenager, I started grabbing the atlas on road trips to clear up confusion about the route.  I remember the sensation of being smarter than my parents.  That's probably not the right word for it.  Unencumbered by adult responsibility and the debilitating effects of age, I was more aware of certain facts or I more easily assimilated certain information.  Don't get me started on my superior small furniture assembly prowess.


When I became a parent, I realized I'd started a waiting game until my kids became "smarter" than me.  Now in my late 30s and feeling the debilitating effects of age, I'm starting to see glimpses that show that nine-year-old Charlie is sharper than dear ol' dad.  He seems to have inherited his mother's astounding memory gene, which should help him very much in life.  I'm pretty sure he still remembers the scores of the two spring training games we saw on our one trip down there.  When he was four. 


Charlie has the advantage that he learns all day at his job.  To his credit, he engages with school and expands his base of knowledge and understanding.  Outside of  school, he reads a ton.  Like many kids he's read all of the Harry Potter books.  I'm not into the Harry Potter books at all, but I pretty cheerfully listened to Charlie's detailed discourse on some matter of spell-casting from the good lady Rowling.  It lasted the whole 20-mile drive home from his grandparents' house.  The content didn't interest me at all; listening to my son talk in broad and sweeping terms peppered with tons of detail about a subject to which he's devoted a lot of time did interest me.


One recent example, also sports-related: we were watching a college bowl game.  As overtime loomed, we started talking about the overtime rules in college football.  I thought I remembered that starting in the third overtime, teams have to go for a touchdown and not just settle for a field goal attempt.  Charlie said that instead it was that if they scored a touchdown in the third overtime or after, they had to go for the two point conversion, not the extra point.  To prove that I knew more, I whipped out my phone and googled college football overtime rules.  Shazam!  Charlie was right.


I'm pleased, of course.  I want him to be smarter, taller and nicer than I am.  If he weren't, that would be disappointing.  Pretty soon, I'll be handing him complicated containers to open and asking him how to run the GPS.  Or just handing it to him, knowing that we're all in better hands.