Daniel Lehmann is sitting in his living room listening to the never-ending travails of his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lina, who has come to spend the summer with him. Her current complaints are about the guy she was dating and who she broke up with just before she came to see him.

“I really checked him out. I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him if he was a jerk. But he turned out to be a jerk anyway.”

Daniel is somewhat hesitant to ask exactly what the nature of his jerkism was. He is not sure how much he wants to know. “Does the jerk have a name?” he asks. And what does the jerk do? Do you go to school with him?”

“Right now, he is driving a tow truck,” Lena responds. “He’s also the goalie for our hockey team.”

“How old is this guy?” asks Daniel who does his best to not make the question sound like part of parental interrogation.

“Don’t get all wired up,” Luna says. “He’s only nineteen. He went to my high school.”

“What exactly did you do to check him out?” Daniel asks.

Lana gives Daniel a look that says she thinks he is dense as a brick. “I asked other girls who know him what he was like. I talked to his friends about what kind of guy he was. Everyone said he was a real nice guy. Honest and solid.”

“I take it that didn’t hold true,” says Daniel.

“Well, no one told me he would cheat on me. He was supposed to be the one,” Luna says, again with the look that challenges his intelligence.

The one? Daniel doesn’t think his daughter is old enough to find the one. Saying so would no doubt lead to an argument between them. Instead, he decides to do something different. He will be the kind of parent he never had.

Once, when he was not much older than his daughter, he wrote to his mother about the challenges of finding himself. That letter was returned with a message written on it: “This sounds like a soap opera.” Remembering how much that stung, Daniel decides to take a different approach.

“I am sorry that it didn’t work out for you sweetie. But you know there are guarantees in life. It’s like buying a car. No matter what the reputation of the vehicle is, you can still find yourself stuck with a lemon.”

Lana gives him the look. “That’s the best you can do? Cars?” she says.

“No honey, I can do a whole lot better than that” Daniel says. “I think it’s important to recognize that some people are bridges between two points and some people are destinations. They both have value. The trick is not to get them mixed up.”

Again, Lina gives Daniel the look, and as she gets up to leave the room, says, “Spare me your personal philosophies.”

Later that day, when the two of them are eating supper, Lana starts to complain about not being able to turn off her brain. “I am always thinking,” she says. “My brain is always working. There’s never a moment when there’s nothing going on inside my head. I am always thinking about something.”

“Ah yes,” says Daniel. “You’re not alone in experiencing that. But more important are the long-term consequences and what they cause you to have.”

“Like what?” asks Lina.

“It causes you to have personal philosophies,” says Daniel.

Lina gives him a look that says, “I can see them lowering your coffin.”