I know stuff. And if I don’t I make crap up.

The Bandit and I were snuggling in his bottom bunk. The room was cozy and dark except for the alligator night-light glowing in the corner. The radio was turned on low to an easy listening station. I was just about ready to fall asleep myself and thought he was already gone when the DJ softly gave the call numbers on the radio.

“What’s FM mean?” he asked. He always comes up with these complicated questions when he should be sleeping.

“There two kinds of radio that we listen to – FM and AM.” I wasn’t about to go into satellite and Citizens Band. Jeez I only have a very rudimentary understanding of radio anyway. “You have to have a certain kind of receiver to pick up the radio. Everyone playing music on the radio has a certain channel they are assigned to called a frequency. That’s the number part.”

“OK,” he said in the darkness. “But what does FM mean?”

“That’s just the difference between how the signal is sent. They change up the sound waves in different ways with AM and FM radio.”

I heard a deep sigh. “But what does FM mean?”

What the hell? Am I in science class? Is there at test at the end of this? “Well usually, FM radio is mostly music and AM radio is mostly talk shows. When I was a kid, we only had AM radio.” I resisted the urge to launch into a bunch of other nonsense we didn’t have when we were kids.

“Mom,” he said the words slowly like I was one of those people that can’t understand the most basic English. “What does FM mean?”

“Frog Music.”

He exhaled a satisfied sigh. “Thank you. Was that really that hard?”

I really wish the kid would stop asking me stuff like this. I always sound like I’m making this crap up.