My sons, who have been visiting their father in LA for several weeks, will return in a week, and I plan on taking them camping soon. We’ve camped a lot over the years, as a family and with Nigel’s Scout troop, and Nigel’s favorite part of camping, like most kids’, is eating s’mores.

A few years ago we camped at Yosemite, and a month or so before the trip, I started to show Nigel pictures of Yosemite and told him that we’d be camping there that summer. At the mention of camping, he asked, “Can we have s’mores?” And I said, “That’s a great idea! You’ll have to remind me before we go to Yosemite.” Nigel, after a few seconds, got a blank look on his face and said, “But I just did.”

I forgot that his mind interprets things so literally. He wouldn’t know the implication that the reminding should take place a day or two before the trip, so that I could buy and pack the ingredients. All I had said was “remind me before we go to Yosemite,” but I didn’t say when exactly.

It makes me wonder if he just accepts that the gooey treats are called s’mores in the same way that cake is called cake and candy is called candy. That’s just what they’re all called. I think he was about ten years old when he went through a why phase, similar to preschoolers asking why the sky is blue. Only, with Nigel, he would ask why the color blue was called blue. Why is cereal called cereal? Why is that a tiger? After many of these nomenclature origin-type of questions, I would reply (slightly exasperated), “We don’t ask why; that’s just what they’re called.” I often wonder if he really wanted to know the meaning of the word, or if he wanted to know the origin of the word, or if he was just asking his “why” questions because he discovered that if he asked a question, the other person would respond to him. It was the next step on his quest to connect with people. He just didn’t know how to structure the questions. Except for “Can we have s’mores?” He mastered that question for sure.