As a father, I asked my young daughter: “What did you learn in school today?”

She could hardly wait to tell him: “We learned that boys are different to girls.”

I looked in the review mirror but could only see her hair.

“My teacher said that boys have a thing that girls don’t.”

“Ah, yes, that’s true,” I said, a little daunted. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so we were quiet for a moment. Then she started talking again:

“That’s how girls know that boys are boys. They see this thing that hangs down, and know: that is a boy.”

In my head I calculated the distance until we made it home. It already felt like eternity.

“Did you know that boys swell up when they see a girl?”

My palms began to sweat: “I, ah.. well..”

I was desperately looking for something else to say, to change the topic, when she asked: “Why do girls like boys to have this thing?”

What could I say? Hadn’t every woman asked herself this question at some point?

“Oh, well… um”, I stammered.

But she didn’t even wait for my answer because she had her own: “It’s because it waggles when they walk and then the girl knows that this is a boy and then she likes him. Then the boy sees the girl and swells up and the girl knows that he also likes her. Then they get married. And then they get cooked.”

The ending confused me but on the whole, she’d hit the nail on the head.

As we arrived home she fished something out of her school bag and said: “I drew a picture of what we learned in school today. Do you want to see it?”

I wasn’t completely sure that I did, but I looked anyway out of curiosity. I had to sit down:

In front of me lay, in all his puffed up, women-enticing glory, was a crayon drawing of a large male turkey! His snood, the red thing that hangs down over his beak, the thing that the female turkeys find so irresistible, was magnificent. His tail feathers were standing tall and proud.

My little girl got offended because I laughed so hard at her drawing, and I laughed until I cried. But when I told her that I loved the picture, she soon forgot my laughter. I will never get this picture out of my head.

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