Toward a Theory of Surprise

1.

Three mornings a week I drop off my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter at her daycare center. We have a routine. First we read a book, then we hug, kiss, high five, and wave before I leave. That’s how every drop-off goes. One recent morning she squirmed throughout the book, distractedly performed our separation ritual, then stopped me from departing by grabbing my wrist. She leaned sideways at the waist and with her other hand gripped the back of her knee. “Dad,” she said, “there’s something weird in my leggings.”

I turned her around and felt the back of her leg with the tips of my fingers. Sure enough, there was something weird in her leggings. The weird something was small and hard, seemingly unattached to her skin. It felt like a stone, a piece of gravel. In half a life how many rocks have I pulled from my socks? The adult mind settles quickly.

“What is it, Dad?” my daughter asked.

“I think it’s a rock,” I said.

With my right hand I reached down the back of her leggings and pinched the object that I had previously secured from outside the leggings, in effect passing the object from my left thumb and forefinger to my right thumb and forefinger. My daughter was curious but not, it seemed to me, impatient or at all embarrassed to have her leggings searched in a crowded room. Nobody in the room—parents, teachers, children, hamster—regarded us with any interest whatsoever. This was standard invasive adjustment. I removed my hand from my child’s leggings so that we could see the object. It was not a rock. Between my thumb and forefinger I held a triangular shard of an oats and honey granola bar.

“Whoa,” my daughter said, and we both laughed. We hugged, kissed, high fived, and waved, and then I left.

The startling conjunction of granola bar and leggings can be explained but could not be foreseen. My discovery was arresting but not baffling. (In a rush that morning, we dressed my daughter in her chair at the table, where she was eating a granola bar….) The moment was poignant for its suggestion of possibility, of ever-lurking oddness. My daughter and I had established a rote drop-off sequence but then a sharp piece of breakfast punctured our routine and our morning was illuminated, made wonderful. How many types of drop-offs might there be? How many variations and interventions? Life with young children is full of such unusual associations and combinations, both joyful and disquieting. (I once clipped a tiny sharp crescent of my daughter’s toenail directly into my eye; my daughter once called a tampon a cheese stick; my wife once unknowingly spilled some olive...