Flickr photo by b offers

I got a call from Dalia’s school this morning. “She’s complaining that her ear hurts,” said the caller. “And her teacher says she’s, ummm, howling.”

Now, this is not a plug for The Wolfman, Benicio del Toro’s movie opening nationwide tomorrow (although, I bet if there were a #Wolfmanmoms blogger junket with a swag bag and a plane ticket to LA, the mom- and dad-blogosphere would be rippling with praise for what a wonderful movie it is for toddlers).

This is instead a shout out to Mohammed Ali. Not the boxer, but the taxi driver who drove me from work to pick up Dalia and then rushed us to make Dalia’s last-minute doctor’s appointment. It would have just been another hectic West Side cab dash, had Ali not spent the whole time in elegant praise of fatherhood.

“This is what God wants you to be doing,” he said, beaming, as I told him I was going to pick up my daughter from school. Ali, who has a son, 12, and a daughter, 14, got metaphysical: “All of these other things, they melt. What stays is your family, your self as a father… to have children is to be in God’s favor.”

It was like getting a ride from Allama Iqbal.

Of course, we all get romantic at times about fatherhood (why else would we be yawping through the tubes about it?). But Ali was willing to take his message to others. “My neighbor, he never had kids. He and his wife like to travel too much, they say. I told them that this money they have, these trips they take, they mean nothing. I told my neighbors, ‘You have nothing. You are empty.”

Good strong words, Mohammed.