Smart or Not?

Yesterday I went to St. Joe's for the 5:30 Spanish Mass. There was a baptism. When Fr. Ed and the family went to the font, all the kids came out of the pews to bless the water and we all turned around. And there was Dawn and her whole family in the front of the back section. (I was in the back of the front section.) So I went over and sat with them.

Afterwards they invited me out for dinner, so we all piled in that infamous white van--which their dad fixed before driving to Indianapolis last week for a cousin's birthday--and went to El Tio for hamburguesas and tacos.

While we were in the van, I told Joey I found the old MRI's of my knee from when I tore my ACL. He has to do a report on bones and joints and they said one way to do it was to bring in an X-ray. Hopefully an MRI will do. We were talking about his report, and out of the blue he said, "I used to be smart when I was seven." He's eight now.

"So what happened?" I said, teasing.

"I don't know. But I think I'm not so smart now."

"Oh, I don't know about that," I said. "I think you're pretty smart. And you're going to get smarter from doing this report."

"I'm pretty smart about bones," he admitted. But I know he's worried about school.

However, five minutes later, as we were stopping at a red light on Ashland and 49th, he asked me, "Why doesn't this hit me in the head?"

"What?" I said. He'd been tossing a football up in the air. He wanted to know why, when you throw a ball straight up in the air inside a moving vehicle, you don't catch up to the ball before it falls down. Now that's a pretty brilliant question from somebody who thinks he's not that smart, right?

I think the answer is because gravity pulls the ball down faster than your head moves toward it, right? Any Mr. Wizards out there with a better answer? I'll have to do some Internet research.....