Zia, Audrey and Ray Coleman after McCollum fell; they watched the residence hall implode from the parking lot at Oliver Hall.

“I’m not answering,” says my son Ray from the backseat as we drive away from the McCollum Hall dust cloud. I’ve just asked him to share his thoughts on one of the weirdest things he’s ever seen: the implosion of a 10-story building. He turned 5 a few weeks ago, and apparently when he blew out the candles he wished for new, more sophisticated ways to be difficult.

“It was too scary,” pipes in my daughter Zia. She’ll be 3 in a month, which means she has mastered all the terribleness of 2. Tomorrow morning, when she regains her appetite for destruction, she pitches a disappointed fit when we can’t provide another major feature of the KU skyline to be demolished for her viewing pleasure as soon as we get dressed and finish breakfast.

Daddy Rules columnist Dan Coleman and his children, Ray and Zia

I question Ray again, because I’m pretty curious. Like so many in town, we drive the stretch of Iowa Street between 19th Street and Bob Billings Parkway almost daily, and we’ve monitored construction of the two new dorms on Daisy Hill all year. At first Ray objected to them on principle, as something new in his line of vision. A few months later, when he finally made peace with their existence, they suddenly donned an offensive wrap of bright green insulation without his permission. But the green became so pleasing to his discerning eye that he was, of course, outraged again when they received brick facades.

Emboldened by the effectiveness of last year’s letter to Santa, he asked if we could write to someone demanding this activity cease and desist, and the buildings stay green. I had to admire his pluck. But you can see why I wasn’t optimistic when I heard McCollum would be coming down. All of this grousing about the changes on Daisy Hill combined with his legendary overreactions to minor changes around the house, such as the replacement of a broken lamp or the putting away of seasonal decorations, had me brainstorming new routes to Munchers that didn’t take us anywhere near 19th and Iowa.

Aren’t we grown-ups supposed to be the ones who are so averse to change? Zia, the youngest member of our family, demolished this theory the day we all piled into our pristinely vacuumed car, and I gushed in gratitude to my wife, who had somehow worked up the gumption to clean out all the loose cereal, discarded wrappers, dried out markers, and whatever other unspeakable substances had accumulated over the past several months. “Where’s my trash?!” Zia screamed through her tears.

I used to wonder how such young kids could already be so set in their ways. Then one morning as I fought with Ray, who insisted on wearing a jacket from the previous year, now inches too short on his wrists, to the preschool he had just begun to attend, it dawned on me that children his age aren’t little reactionaries at all. They bring the revolution every day. For them, radical change — in their bodies, in their schedules, in the people who surround them — is a way of life.

So they fuss, try to control what they can: the pictures on their walls, the arrangement of stuffed animals on their beds, which ball caps their dads wear, the color of buildings they pass each day on the way to some destination they probably didn’t choose. The years pass, and it may not get much easier, but they figure out something we all eventually must: That’s life.

Surprisingly, as we talk in the weeks leading up to the McCollum implosion, Ray and Zia seem not only to take it in stride, but game to go watch. Maybe 3 and 5 is easier than 2 and 4.

Apparently they aren’t the only kids who think it sounds cool. The parking lot at Oliver Hall looks more like a playground when we arrive. Like everyone else, we wait, take a photo of ourselves with McCollum behind us, watch it fall, then take the same picture again, no McCollum.

Ray never does answer my question about what he thinks, but sticks to his old trick of questioning me: Why did they knock it down? What are they going to put there now?

The morning’s business takes us in the opposite direction of the big dust cloud, east on Kansas Highway 10 out of town, and I see up ahead one of the bridges they are building here has finally made it all the way across. New bridges go up over the highway, old buildings on the Hill come down. I think of a snapshot I once marveled at, of my dad and uncle as young men in the late 1950s, up there when it was still just daisies. I wonder if I looked right through their ghosts this morning, hovering above the rubble with the helicopters and circling planes. I think of my wife, almost 20 years younger, living in a cinder block room on the ninth floor of a building that’s not there anymore, her future role in my life completely unknown to me. I think of my own hazy stumbles from Ellsworth to McCollum for breakfast, down in a basement cafeteria that’s now ground zero.

I lay on my horn as we drive under the new bridge for the first time, and Ray saves his best question for last.

“Why did we all clap after it fell?”

“Why did I just honk?” I say. “I don’t know.”

— Dan Coleman is secretary on the board of Dads of Douglas County. He is a part-time stay at home dad with a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, but in his other life he is a librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, where he selects children’s and parenting books for the Children’s Room. He can be reached at danielfcoleman@yahoo.com.