I, Ignoramus

"Duh..."--Socrates

It is alleged that Socrates once said, “I am the wisest man alive for I know one thing and that is I know nothing.” These are the sour words of a tired man, a statement of disillusioned resignation. I can relate, for I, too know nothing.  How do I know this? I am the parent of a four year-old girl.

I was introduced to the horrifying abyss of my own ignorance one recent Saturday afternoon while making pizza with Mabel, my four year-old daughter and intellectual superior. At the time, I was even stupider than I am now, because had I known what a presumptuous idiot I was, I would have never dared to correct her when I noticed that she had neglected to properly separate one pepperoni from another. But correct her I did.

She paused. Sighing like Sylvia Plath in the sorrowful blue glow of the pilot light, she rolled her eyes wearily and said, “You don’t know EVERYthing.”

And with those four words, a vast metaphorical chasm opened up right there in the linoleum of the kitchen floor. It yawned horribly, its mouth full of everything I knew–nothing.  The sound of stupidity echoed deep within, bringing with it a pungent waft of failure–“Yakety Sax” played in the key of fart.  On the other side of this dark sea of dumb was Mabel, who has yet to even learn to read, primly placing pepperonis on the refrigerator in a configuration strongly resembling the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

It’s taken weeks for the full magnitude of this shocking revelation to absorb through the Neanderthalian thickness of my skull and then compute through the elderly grapevine of dying brain cells rattling aimlessly about therein. But the facts cannot be disputed.

I do not know everything, therefore I know nothing. The whispering roar of the infinite is beyond my primate hand-me-down neuro-sensory set up, and even if I had somehow acquired the equipment to pick up the signal, my inability to comprehend it would render it so much baffling Telemundo.

Why, I am a complete ignoramus! Who am I to tell a four year-old girl anything? For all I know, everything I’ve taught her is a joke and a lie. What if it turns out that potty-training is a huge cosmic mistake? What if matching clothes and tied shoes are actually the uniform of the janitors of the universe?  And proper grammar–would it be interpreted as “fightin’ words” by alien invaders?

I do not know everything, therefore I know nothing. One might suppose, then, that I should be as wise as Socrates. But that idiot only had sons, so what the hell does he know?