After the success of our visit to the Leonora Carrington exhibition, I became slightly overconfident.

This is always dangerous in parenting.

This time, I took G to a large retrospective on Metaphysical Art — the Italian movement associated above all with Giorgio de Chirico, but also with a much broader visual world of empty piazzas, long shadows, silent statues, strange buildings, mannequins, trains, and that very particular atmosphere of suspended unease.

People often assume I am my daughter’s grandfather.

This is not outrageous. It is not offensive. It is not even especially inaccurate from a statistical point of view. We are sixty-one years apart, which means that if someone sees us together in a park, a shop, or on the street, “grandfather” is a perfectly understandable guess.

For a long time, I was the one who handled the correction.

This week marked a major milestone in our household: my daughter turned nine. But instead of our usual morning routine, I spent her birthday driving up into the beautiful Italian Alps. She is currently away on a basketball summer camp with her team, and while parents aren't usually hovering around, I was granted a special dispensation to drop by and deliver a birthday cake for the whole squad.

Seeing her thrive in that environment—surrounded by friends, completely independent, and deeply engrossed in her sport—sparked a conversation I seem to have constantly with other parents.

My daughter recently saw me reading one of my beloved crime novels and asked a question that was both innocent and completely reasonable:

“Dad, why do adults read about murders?”

It is the kind of question children ask when they are not yet used to accepting adult contradictions as normal. From her point of view, the problem was obvious. Murder is bad. People are killed. So why would anyone choose, voluntarily, to read a book about it?

My first answer was not my finest moment.

“Because they’re entertaining.”

I'll be honest about my baseline: most of the cartoons that pass across our television I tolerate at best. I'm seventy years old. I'm not the audience, and I don't pretend to be. So when I tell you there's one I actually sit down and watch with my daughter, I'm not performing enthusiasm. I mean it.

There is a British children's author my daughter calls "Our Friend." She has, as far as I can tell, no idea we exist. Almost.

About three years ago, when my daughter was six and the bedtime Isadora Moon habit had already taken hold, I posted a photo to Instagram: she was on her bed, surrounded by a small mountain of Harriet Muncaster paperbacks. I tagged Harriet, more out of reflex than expectation. She clicked one little heart. That was it.

I went to collect my daughter from art class and walked into chaos. The entire class was face-down on the floor, slapping the tiles and chanting two numbers: "six-seven." One very patient teacher stood in the middle of it holding a tablet, looking like a woman counting down the minutes to retirement.

They had just watched the Pope do "six-seven."

There's a wolf mask involved. Bear with me.

Today I turn seventy. It lands, by accident of the calendar, on a Blue Moon — the second full moon to rise in a single month, which is where the phrase "once in a blue moon" comes from. This one peaks in the small hours of May 31, 2026, and it's also a micromoon: the most distant, and therefore smallest, full moon of the whole year. A small, far-off moon for a small, far-off feeling. It suits the day.

"Dad, can we go to see that?"

We were walking through the streets of Milan, dodging the usual afternoon foot traffic, when my eight-year-old daughter stopped and pointed. It wasn't a toy store or a gelato stand. It was a street poster promoting an exhibition of Leonora Carrington paintings.

If you open any parenting book published in the UK or the US, you’ll find a stern chapter about the "Gold Standard" of childhood sleep: the 7:30 p.m. bedtime. For a child in 3rd grade (or terza elementare as we say here in Italy), the experts insist on 10 to 11 hours of shut-eye.

As a 69-year-old father, I read these guidelines and I have to laugh. Not because I don't value sleep—believe me, at my age, I value it immensely—but because these guidelines clearly weren't written by anyone living in Milan.

The Cultural Clock