Family Outings

A few weeks ago, over dinner, my parents and I got into a talk about Albert Einstein. We were discussing his intelligence, math, nuclear weapons, "I.Q." with Tim Robbins, etc., when my mother mentioned that it must have been really hard to be Einstein's mother. At this point in the conversation, I paused and asked what she meant. "Well, I'm just saying it would be so difficult to parent a genius," she said. "Can you imagine what that would be like?" "No," I said. "But, don't you think you have some inkling of what it would be like to have a genius for a child?" Then, there was another, much longer pause. It was awkward.