More questions and the single mom

If you've been a reader of my blog in the past, you've seen my posts (here, here, here and here -- subscription required) about the incessant and rather bizarre questions my son tends to ask.

The other day was the mother of all bizarre question days. We were driving home from the beach, so, granted, he had a lot of free time on his hands for his little mind to wander to diverse and varied topics. But still, some of these are just out there.

Here are the questions I got over the course of a few hours (and these are verbatim -- I wrote them down to be sure):

-Why do grownups have parents?

-Is my daddy dead yet? (To clarify this one a bit -- I asked him why he asked that, and he said, "Because he smokes a lot.")

-Do police never let bad guys go?

-Does God live?

Seriously. Seriously? These are the questions I have to figure out how to answer while driving 75 miles an hour across the heart of the Palmetto State, battling back weariness and fatigue and the growing urge to pee? Seriously?!?

I was recounting this list to a friend and her first question, and perhaps yours as well, is what did I answer. Well, I wish I had spewed forth some awe-inspiring wisdom, but mostly I just fumbled my way through something that would satisfy him.

Little did I know, he had more gems waiting for me in response to my feeble efforts.

"Well, honey, the bad guys can be let go after they get punished for a while. Like when you get a time out, you have to sit for a while but then you can get up and play. Bad guys have a grown-up time out for a while, and then they get a second chance to be good and can go home."

"But bad guys don't have houses," he replied.

What have I wandered into now, I thought.

"Of course they do. They have to go home somewhere just like we do."

He thought about this for a moment and then decided, "They don't have food in their houses like we do."

It wasn't a question. He was stating, for the record, that bad guys' houses don't have food.

I guess he needed to make sure bad guys were different in some way from the rest of us. I guess if I were 5 years old, it would seem awfully scary for bad guys to be just like the rest of us, too.

Still, where does this stuff come from??