You’ve never had to explain yourself until you have to explain yourself to a child. You can’t get away with letting things slide by saying, “Well, you know how it is.” Because they don’t know how it is. They know they are supposed to do as you tell them, and as their teachers tell them, and as other authorities tell them. They don’t always live up to it, but up until a certain age, they generally don’t argue with the principle. So when Fire Prevention Week rolls around in the first part of October, you’d best make sure that all of your smoke alarms are installed properly and in good working condition. You should prepare to run a fire drill for your family, and to meet outside at your designated spot. And you should have fresh batteries for those smoke detectors on hand for when you change the clocks at the end of Daylight Savings Time. Because if you have a preschooler or a kindergartner in your house, it’s a bit like living with Pinocchio’s Jiminy Cricket, always calling you to task when you fail to live up to their standards. And kids have pretty high standards for their parents. Once they know what you, as a family, should be doing, they won’t rest until you do it, or explain to their satisfaction why you won’t. I can’t say I took smoke alarms all too seriously when I was young; I truly don’t know if we had them in the house where I grew up. As a young adult, I was probably more annoyed by them going off accidentally than anything. But by the time Caroline started kindergarten, we knew the drill: point out and count the smoke alarms for the worksheet. Talk about ways to get out of the house in an emergency. Designate a meeting place outside. This is about more than developing good fire-safety habits. Think about how different the world would be, how different we would be, if we all just did what we know we are supposed to do. That was one of the things I thought when I saw the relics of St. Maria Goretti carried into St. John Cantius Church, saw how small the statue that encases her skeleton was. She’s a saint because of the radical forgiveness she extended to her attacker as she was dying. In her mind, I think, it was simply doing what she was supposed to do. Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, to forgive those who did them harm. And she did. And when her attacker, who had gone through his own profound repentance, approached her mother, her mother followed the daughter’s example. If Maria forgave the man, Alessandro Serenelli, how could she not? She couldn’t say to her daughter in heaven, “It’s too hard. You know how it is.”