Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2008.

Once, when my son was around 8 years old, he asked whether we could go see a movie (one we had just seen the previous weekend), and I said no, we couldn’t. “If we’re not going to see a movie,” he demanded in anguish, “then why did you have me?”

He was always pretty good at asking questions — like this one, a particular favorite of mine: “Dad,” he asked, “if I were a werewolf, where would I go to the bathroom?”

At dinnertime, my son would leave the table, too full of kinetic energy to do more than briefly touch his bottom to...