Sitting at Leah’s Mom’s dining room table for breakfast one morning last weekend, Sam stopped eating and asked, “Daddy, who was the first person?”
“Well Sam, Mommy is the oldest person in our family. Then me, then you, then Noah, then Aidan.”
“No, Daddy, who was the FIRST person?”
Oh, boy. My mind raced for the best answer.
“Well, Sammy, that’s a really good question. Do you remember the book we read in church? It’s called the Bible. And in the Bible, it says that God made the first person. His name was Adam, and God made him from dust and clay! Pretty crazy, eh? And that’s where some people think the first person came from.
But there are other people who think that there really never was a ‘first’ person. They believe something called the Theory of Evolution. It says that all human beings come from monkeys. Can you believe it? Waaayyyyy back before anyone was born, some monkeys started to slowly change. And over a long, long, long time, they eventually developed into people like you and me.
People argue all the time about which idea is better. But if you think about it, they both are probably right. Because, after all, who made the monkeys?”
Sam sat there for a second.
“Daddy,” he said with wide eyes a crazy grin on his face, “maybe the GORILLAS made the monkeys!”
And he started laughing, hopped down from the table, and marched off to play with his brothers none the worse for my existential ramblings.
It just furthers Mikey’s theory that, even when faced with philosophically overwhelming ideas, monkeys are still funny.
