My son’s eyebrows met in the middle as his upper lip disappeared beneath the lower.  “The library?” he asked.  His tiny nose scrunched the way it always does when he knows the answer is no.

I shook my head. My boy is now on his 264th guess, give or take. “Nope,” I said, “try again.”

“Ummmmm…” he elasticized the sound until it was almost at a chant. “Are we going to Disneyland?”

I could say that the guesses were growing outlandish, but a few predictions back he went with Las Vegas and there were definitely no plans of crossing any borders.

“Is it the park where there is the statue of the tall, tall man?”

I said “No,” but that particular prediction saw me scooping up my son, spinning him around, and tossing him on the bed for a torrent of tickles.  “Guess again.”

The tall, tall man is none other than the 16th president of the United States, Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe happens to have a statue sitting at the entrance to a park we haven’t even breathed near for the last two years.

“The garbage dump?”

“He wishes,” I thought while shaking my head.

“The beach?”

“Not quite, buddy.”

By this time, my boy has been guessing for almost an hour and I’m honestly shocked he hasn’t yet nailed it. The answer is the movies to which he has already been handful of times. That’s more than I can say for Texas, the Island of Sodor, or “Dinosaur Missouri,” all which add to the sum total of never.

“Saturn?” his voice hit a pitch that let me know that he knew the precise giddiness of his guess.

“You finally got it!” I said.

“No,” My soon shook his head and fell into a fit of giggles. “We can not go to outer space.”

Surprisingly, he never did get it, but that’s not what this story’s about. He was undaunted no doubt, but the reason I’m relating this tale is because I was stricken by the wide reach of my little man’s recall.

If my boy can so fluidly draw memory of the park with the tall, tall man, even though we haven’t stepped foot in the shade of that American giant in half a preschooler’s lifetime, then there are a hundred million other moments inside the deepest trenches of his mind, waiting for resurrection.

I can’t control every machination of my children’s lives, nor would I ever want to.  They will choose what to make and who to make it with.  They are with me now though, and most of their minutes fall within my orbit.  I must make sure I manage all that rolls before me.

Sean Platt is a dad and a ghostwriter for hire who also tweets.

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