Friday afternoon, about 3:30 p.m., I picked my sons up from day care. Alex and I had discussed that morning the possibility of a trip to the playground in the afternoon, but Mother Nature had other plans. As I loaded Cooper into his baby seat and helped Alex, just turned 3, into his seat, the rain which had threatened all afternoon began to come down in earnest.

As I got into the driver's seat, Alex asked, "Are we going to the playground today, Daddy?"

"It doesn't look like it, big boy. It's raining pretty hard."

"Why?"

At this point, you parents reading this have begun to nod knowingly. For those of you not yet gifted with offspring, allow me to continue.

"Because Mother Nature knew we needed the rain, so she sent us some."

"Why did she send it to us?"

"Because the ground is very dry and the plants are very sad."

"Why didn't she send us some snow?"

"It's too warm for snow. Besides, we need rain more."

"Why?"

I'll stop that here before any of you feel compelled to begin ripping out chunks of hair. Suffice it to say that the questioning went on for a dozen or more exchanges, until finally I got the magic reply: "Oh."

Yes, I've just spent the last 15 minutes fielding questions that would make Jack McCoy proud and maintaining a pleasant and non-stifling tone the entire time, and my reward is "Oh." Moreover, I am happy with this reward. To me, it's a sign of great success and achievement. Why on earth does this satisfy me? In what dark, fevered little corner of my brain did the damage occur that allowed me gain a tremendous sense of fulfillment from this interrogation session.

The answer lies not with the question, but with the questioner, of course. Alex is 3, and as such the world is largely still an open book to him. Certainly sometimes his questions are actually probes, trying to find loopholes or ways around house rules, but that sort of deviousness to any great scale is still several years away. I've made great efforts to let him know that the only bad question is the one that goes unasked, so I'm not about to buck at answering a meteorologically-related queries.

Besides, answering his questions more often than not leaves me thinking, myself, if only about what made a certain thing come up as a question or why a question was asked in a certain way. It helps me understand the way he sees the world. Questioning things in one's environment is one of the first ways of gaining control and marking out your place in the grand scheme of things. If you are secure enough in your own skin to start asking questions about other things, your learning is ready to take flight.

All highfaluting talk aside, Alex's questions let me see the world through his eyes, and give me back just a bit of that sense of wonder, that "wow, cool!" that I used to feel every time I found a new bug, rode a new trail or made another kid-science discovery. For fleeing moments, I'm 5 again, piling rocks in the little stream in front of our house in Cullowhee, N.C., just to see what the water would do and flooding the front yard in the process.

Will any of this make it any easier to deal with silly or repetitive questions from adults? Absolutely not! I still don't suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. The difference is that Alex's questions come from a genuine curiousity and sense of wonder, not from a lifetime of being barely smart enough to dress himself compounded by a steadfast refusal to pay attention to anything going on in the world that doesn't directly involve Britney or Paris.

Cooper is a couple of years behind Alex. I wonder if Alex will be willing to take a job as a question-fielder from time to time. Some of that stuff can get pretty technical for an adult!

Got a question? Comment? Rant? Rave? Bucket of spare money? Drop me a line, anytime!