As any father would, he asked his daughter what she’d learned in school that day. Since she was still only in grade school, he assumed he’d be regaled with stories of the ABCs and learning the value of sharing. You know what they say about assuming, right?
“Today,” she said proudly, “we learned that boys are different from girls!”
Looking in the rear view mirror, the father could only see his daughter’s hair – she was still so little.
“My teacher said that boys have a thing that girls don’t,” she continued.
“Ah…yes, well that is true,” the father said, a little daunted. Unable to think of anything further to say, he anxiously let the car descend into silence…and then his daughter started talking again.
“See, that’s how girls know that boys ARE boys,” she said. “They see this little thing that hangs down and know: that is a boy!”
As she was saying all this, the father was frantically calculating in his head just how long they had between where they were and home. His conclusion: literally an eternity!
“Did you know that boys swell up when they see a girl?” she asked, innocently.
At this point, the dad’s hands had grown slick on the steering wheel as his palms began to sweat.
“I, ah, um…well…” he stammered, desperately trying to think of something, ANYTHING to say that might change the topic.
Then, she dropped the bomb!
“Daddy, why do girls like boys to have this thing?”
“Good lord,” the father thought. “What should I say? Hasn’t every woman asked that question at one point or another?”
“Oh…well, umm…you see sweetie…”
But the little girl didn’t even wait for his answer!
“It’s because it waggles when they walk, so the girl knows that this is a boy and that she likes him. Then, the boy sees the girl and he swells up, and then the girl knows that he ALSO likes her,” she explained. “Then they get married, and then they get cooked!”
‘Well, uncomfortable,” thought Dad, “but not wrong.”
Though the ending confused him slightly (cooked?), the father considered it and thought that maybe it was a good thing that his daughter knew the beginner’s birds and bees.
As they arrived home, the little girl fished something out of her school backpack and said, “Daddy, I drew a picture of what we learned at school today, wanna see?”
While he wasn’t totally sure that he did, the father glanced down out of curiosity at the drawing his daughter was proudly holding up. When he saw what she had made, he had to sit down.
Scrawled across the paper, in all his woman-enticing glory, was a detailed crayon drawing of a large, male turkey! His snood (the red thing that dangles over the male’s beak), the thing that female turkeys find oh-so-irresistible, was magnificently drawn, his tail feathers stood tall and proud.
The little girl got offended because her father laughed so hard at her drawing, laughed until he cried, in fact, but he reassured her that he really loved her drawing, and she soon forgot about his laughter.
The father, however, would never be able to get that turkey out of his head!