I will become like you, Dad

On one evening in 1988, my parents hosted a dinner party at home. I was sixteen, and I was thrilled not to be invited. Freedom meant everything to me; all I wanted was to go out with my friends, without being dragged into adult conversations.

But leaving through the front door, from which the dining room was directly visible, was an unforgivable mistake.

My father called out, “Michael Collins,” using my first and middle names, which he loved dearly and was the only one who ever used them. Then he said, “Tell us something you’ve learned at school.”

It was common in the 1980s for fathers to summon their sons to perform in front of guests, as if they were trained seals in a circus. They were the officers, and we were the infantry. I was grateful that I wasn’t asked to sing.

“Okay,” I said, trying to buy some time while I rummaged through the memory files in my head. Then the answer came to me.

A few weeks earlier, my father had watched the film “Stand and Deliver,” that inspiring movie about high school math teacher Jaime Escalante, who pushed his students at a school in a poor neighborhood to excel in Advanced Placement calculus.

When my father realized where I had drawn that clever remark I had delivered to his dinner guests, he didn’t let me off the hook. He teased me for having purchased, at a high price, an appearance of culture and knowledge.

A tree had fallen on the driveway in front of my house, and I was inspecting the damage. My son Jack, who was fifteen, approached me and spoke with an unusual depth for him.

“The tree falls in the direction it leans,” he said. “So pay attention to the direction it leans.”

My heart swelled with pride. I thought to myself that I was clearly raising a mini C.S. Lewis.

But the next day, I searched the internet for that beautiful wisdom.

It turned out that Jack hadn’t invented it at all. He had taken it verbatim from the main character in “The Lorax,” a Dr. Seuss classic.

In an instant, I found myself back in the dining room of my childhood home, but this time seeing it through the eyes of my old man.

Knowledge is good, regardless of its source, and for full transparency, I learned that phrase too from Emile Dartagnan, the founder of Faber College in “Animal House.”