A father tucks his son into bed and tells him not to pop out like last night. The father struggles with disciplining his son, often ruminating over a comment by a friend (who has no children) that many parents are really “annihilating” their children rather than helping them. The boy tells his father a long-winded story about a dream in which the boy and his mother were looking for badgers. The father wonders why he isn’t in the dream and gently questions his son, who replies that maybe the father was watching his television. The father goes to give his son a goodnight kiss—on the forehead—but the son moves to kiss him on the lips. The father doesn’t say anything, but adjusts to kiss the boy on the forehead. He recalls that, when he was a boy, he stayed in a lake house one summer with his extended family. One night, he tried to kiss his uncle on the lips before bed, but his uncle turned away and said he could only kiss his female relatives on the lips, instructing the boy to kiss him on the cheek instead. The whole family was present, and everyone laughed. The father thinks that kissing his son on the lips might be fine now, but not when his son is older. The father worries that he is doing something wrong and that he doesn’t know it yet.