Saturday. A father and his little boy. I walk by the two changing in their row of lockers. Dad, buttoning shirt. Boy, balancing on one foot, stepping clumsily into jeans. I find my locker in the next row. Begin changing. And there's this exchange:

"Daddy?" The kid's voice is the only sound in the locker room. And the octave range—I forgot they made voices like that—puts him at about four. He seems to be chewing over something, like he's on the brink of asking one of life's most perplexing questions. You know, something like, Why is the sky blue? or Why do men have wee-wees? Something profoundly important.

"Yeah, son?" Dad seems accustomed to relentless questioning.

The boy sighs. He is searching for the right words to express this worrying thing ... and then, he finds them:

"Do you like my Spiderman shirt?"

I can almost hear the father's grin. Or maybe it was my own grin I heard. After a pause, dad says: "Yes, son. I like your Spiderman shirt very much."

"I do too," says the boy.

And I could tell it satisfied him very much that they both liked his shirt.

And if you want to know the truth, it satisfied me too. Because I miss the days when having a Spiderman shirt on—and having your dad like it—was all you needed to feel good and right in the world.

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