What Builds Castles

 

Besides that being a great name for a publisher -- if you recall Thoreau's saying about castles in the air, "that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." -- it's also the start of a riddle I plan to tell my kids when I take them up to bed tonight. Two nights ago I asked them the classical Riddle of the Sphinx (What walks on four feet in the morning, two feet in the afternoon, and three feet in the evening?) and Jeffrey came out right away with the answer! Truth be known, I don't remember hearing it from his lips before he dropped off, but I wouldn't put it past him. The answer is man, and the riddle is an allegory of a person's life; in the morning (when he's born) he crawls on all fours ("four feet"), in the afternoon when he's an adult he walks on two feet, and in the evening when he's an old man he uses a cane (his third foot). It's how I first read it when I was eight in The Big Book of Amazing Facts, and Wikipedia's article on the Sphinx who tells the riddle and eats whoever's trying to get into Thebes who doesn't get the answer right has a different translation:

Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?

Sorry, I still prefer the rendering I'm familiar with and it's less confusing! In any event, the following morning Sarah typed part of the riddle in and found the answer herself on Yahoo! Answers. Ah, the days before you could routinely access search engines ... anyway, the riddle I'm going to tell Sarah and Jeffrey before bed tonight which they can cogitate on while they sleep is, with a touch of irony (the opposite of wrinkly), ANOTHER Riddle of the Sphinx, this one told to Batman and Robin on a Super Friends episode from the late seventies. [[[Just got a call from Martha, 1238 CST, as I write this -- Sarah's getting picked up from school because there's crust on her eye that is possibly pinkeye, please pray with me for her.]]] The Super Friends -- picture a kid-friendlier version of DC Comics' Justice League -- were being tested on the planet Caltos at the instigation of the Greek goddess Hera (who seems to be a thorn in everyone's side in Greek myth, but considering how often her husband AND BROTHER Zeus cheated on her, it's hard to be too ... hard on her), and the Sphinx's riddle:

What builds castles, tears down mountains, makes some men blind and helps others to see?

was presented to the Dynamic Duo. Took them a while, but just before the Sphinx was about to bite into them Batman said the answer was sand. Children use sand to build sandcastles, sand erodes ("tears down") mountains, makes some men blind by blowing into their eyes in a sandstorm (or by falling into your face after you're getting up from your kids burying you in the sand, but I digress), and sand is heated to make glass and mounted into glasses -- among which I benefit from -- that help others to see! Before work this morning I field tested the riddle at Coffee With The Boys where the five, six other people there are ten to twenty years older than me ... and nobody got it (though Pastor Janet returned the favor with a riddle of her own that I'd heard before but had forgotten the answer). One of the guys there said solving the riddle was a job for Batman, and I told him that he's the one who solved it. Now I've got to come up with some more to tease the kids and get them thinking -- and Martha too, for she did ask me after the kids were in bed what the answer to #1 was.

What goes up a chimney down, but won't go down a chimney up?

Now that I know or more accurately recall the answer to the riddle Pastor Janet gave me -- it's an umbrella; when it's closed it will go down a chimney, but when you open it there's not enough space for it to go up a chimney, unless it's a very wide chimney I guess. I also got to sleep in this morning since it wasn't my day to do our paper route (but it will be tomorrow) and thanking God that Sarah and Jeffrey decided to as well -- even if Sarah's slumber was due to the possible pinkeye, see two paragraphs above -- even though they came down to see Martha off to work (she goes in at 0700 weekdays) as they have been since the start of this year I think. Of course, they're a few hours into school when I go into work, except for Saturdays when I strongly encourage them to sleep in! Of course, that often goes the way of the dodo as it did when I was a kid and cartoons beckoned. I was looking on Bing and Youtube for videos of one in particular, in fact -- Pandamonium on CBS in the early 80s but could only find the title sequence, no episodes. Now that's a riddle to me!

David