A Story in the Style of Dave Atkinson

My friend Dave Atkinson maintains a lovely blog filled with everyday tales of his family life; I recommend subscribing. As an homage, here’s a small tale from the bedtime story hour with Oliver.

On Monday night I went looking for a bedtime story. The chilling tale of the young Ukrainian boy who barely escaped the Holocaust hadn’t passed muster the week before (too scary), and I hadn’t found anything to take its place.

So I went down to my own bookshelf and pulled off my copy of The Macintosh Way, Guy Kawasaki’s tale of working at Apple in the 1980s.

The book opens with a tale of Ashton-Tate, Apple, and a database called 4th Dimension that Apple was thinking of acquiring for the Mac. There’s a meeting at the heart of the first chapter involving Ashton-Tate and its desire to thwart the 4th Dimension purchase to avoid being in competition with Apple in the Mac database market.

All of this was interesting to me, but I was concerned that, for Oliver, it was just boring business talk. And that, while not particularly scaring, this book too wouldn’t pass muster. So I considered not even finishing the first chapter.

At this point, though, Oliver chimed in:

“This is just like Bug’s Life and Antz,” he said.

I had to think for a moment.

“You’re right, it is… how do you know about that story?”, I asked.

“From the Steve Jobs biography,” Oliver said.

Is there anything that can make a lateral-thinking father more proud than a sudden outburst of lateral thinking from his son?