Emily L. Stephens' previous work for The Toast can be found here.
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.” - Casaubon, narrator of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
It’s a common trope: the father as a teller of tall tales, spinner of stories, a larger-than-life figure who molds our…
My father calls the tooth fairy the tooth bunny, because my grandparents didn’t know how to say “fairy” when he was a little boy. He jumped off the roof of their house once, using a towel as a cape, because his parents explained to him that a man named S-u-p-e-r could fly. They spread their arms out wide, to emphasize how he flew, but no one knew how to tell him Superman wasn’t
