One evening, when my wife was working late, the kids and I made this trip without her. Sally, age 4, rode in the wagon with 7-year-old Marie pulling. Baby Wendy was in a papoose rack on my back.

Coming home on the trail, as we approached a backyard picnic, four burly guys stomped onto the trail ahead of us and started fighting. One pair locked into a bear hug right away and lurched off the trail, crashing through the undergrowth down the wooded slope toward the river.
The other two traded a few punches and then wrestled each other to the ground, where Lug No. 1 put Lug No. 2 into a wrestling hold called “the cradle.” It gave him such excellent control he could free up a hand to punch his captive’s head every little while.
Sally and I were shocked but interested. Marie, the oldest, was frightened and shrank back against me. With the contest on the trail stabilized into a deadlock, I put Marie into the wagon with Sally and we hurried past as No. 1 punched the head of No. 2 and asked him: “Want some more?” No. 2 denied him the satisfaction of an answer. From down near the river, came grunts and wild rustlings, but thick foliage obscured the view.

Despite my righteous disdain for their violence, I couldn’t help feeling kind of unmanly guiding my little Girl Scout troop past these panting bulls in their ferocious impasse. (Like most men, I have a feeling that I could do well in a fight, but this isn’t based on anything real.)
Looking back the way we’d come, I saw that more picnickers had clambered up onto the trail and surrounded Nos. 1 and 2. A couple of women were screeching at them to stop.
“Why are they fighting?” Sally wanted to know.
“I don’t know why exactly. But remember the scene in ‘Bambi’ when the two man deers are fighting each other with their antlers? It’s something like that,” I explained. “Young guy-animals like to fight.” Then, afraid I’d made a beery slugfest sound like a wholesome celebration of vitality, I mentioned that when grown men fight, they can do permanent damage and even kill each other, so smart and nice men don’t do it.

Marie asked, “Will they do that tomorrow?”

“They might,” I said, “But probably not. Maybe this fight will settle whatever they are upset about. Maybe they’ll never fight each other again, but they may get into more fights, because they probably aren’t very good at talking things out.” Not wanting her to think that such brawling is commonplace or to fear that her own dad might suddenly trade blows with the mailman, I noted, “I haven’t had a fight since I was in high school.”

“Who did you fight?” Marie asked, as I pulled the wagon through the gloom.

“My pal Doug – you know, Dylan’s dad,” I said. “I was annoying him and his girlfriend, and he got mad and jumped on me and punched my head, and I bit him on the wrist and threw him on the ground. It wasn’t as big as the fight we just saw.”

“I like those girls who were trying to stop it,” Marie said.

“Well,” I said, “There’s a good chance that those girls are what those guys were fighting over. A lot of times that kind of fight is about whose girlfriend is whose. When you get older, your best bet would be to not hang around with guys who fight.”

“That’s OK,” she said. “I don’t like boys that much – except Cousin Dave.”

Sally wasn’t saying much, but she was listening attentively. When we got home, she jumped out of the wagon and ran to tell her neighborhood pals about the fighting guys. That night, when I put her to bed, Sally brandished her little fists and asked me playfully, “Wanna fight?” She was funny, so I laughed.

And Marie, opting for a chat instead of her usual bedtime story, said that when the men were fighting, “It made me wish I was at home, with my bear, in bed.” She was upset, so I hugged her.

The world can be an unwholesome place, and a few guys thumping each other after a few beers are the least of it. I’d prefer to shelter the kids from this kind of thing, but it does provide an opportunity for discussion.
Rick Epstein can be gotten to at rickepstein@yahoo.com

I remembered the first of the 50 times I’d read the jumbo 96-pager. It had captivated me right from the start. As a kid, Teddy Roosevelt had studied zoology and learned taxidermy. Bookish and puny, he’d taken boxing lessons so he could pound anyone who called him a “pantywaist” or “four-eyes.” Being something of a four-eyed pantywaist myself, I could appreciate his moxie. And as for stuffing dead animals, well, who WOULDN’T envy that skill?
Amazingly, his adult life was even better. T.R. bought a ranch in North Dakota and shot a buffalo and bears; he joined the Army and shot Spanish soldiers; he became vice president of the U.S. and then somebody else shot the president; and much later he went on safaris to Africa and South America and shot whatever he could hit.

It’s not like he could just dish it out and not take it; one day on the campaign trail in Milwaukee, someone shot HIM. He staggered to the podium and began his talk saying, “I’m going to ask you to be very quiet. You see, there is a bullet in my body.” And he pulled out his speech manuscript and there was a hole through it. Whoa!

And in between all this politically incorrect gunplay, he was a family man with six children. My own dad had been named in honor of T.R., but similarities between Teddy Epstein and Teddy Roosevelt were few. Dad was smart and morally upright like the original Theodore, but that was about it. Dad was a librarian who loved the INdoors and believed that excitement was the result of stupidity or poor planning, and could be avoided by prudence and hard work. His love-gift to us was a childhood free of excitement. So naturally I was tantalized by this illustrated glimpse of another parenting style.

In the comic book, T.R. gives Ted Jr. his first rifle. There is no time to go outside and try it out before dinner, so T.R. fires a test bullet into the bedroom ceiling. “It sure does shoot!” says the luckiest boy in the world. The wildest thing I ever saw MY dad do was roast an ear of corn over a gas-burner of our kitchen range.
Then T.R. is off to war, returning home with great stories, more guns, his war horse, a caged vulture and a few of his troopers. (Running down the driveway Ted Jr. exclaims: “Rough Riders! Real Rough Riders!”) It’s as if the Spanish-American War had been fought mainly for the amusement of the Roosevelt kids.

In the White House, it gets even better. The kids have the run of the place as no one had since the British looted and burned the joint in 1814. There are presidential pillow fights in the nursery and roller-skating and stilt-walking races in the corridors. When Archie is ill, his little brother Quentin brings his pony into the sickroom to cheer him up. On Page 61, Quentin scares a congressman with live snakes, including a red-and-yellow one that I would’ve given anything to own. T.R. just laughs at the wild-eyed lawmaker.

Best of all, were the cross-country obstacle walks that T.R. would lead his kids and their cousins on. “Now everyone has to follow me exactly and do everything I do, including climbing over or swimming through any obstacle. You can never go around it. Are you all ready?” says the president. Then they’re shown sliding down a precipice, climbing over a shed and swimming across a pond. My own dad stayed pretty much on the sidewalks and urged us to do the same. He was not one for sliding, climbing or swimming. In fact, I’d never even seen my dad run. He figured that if you plan ahead and keep an eye on the clock, you’ll never have to.

In the closing pages, an aging T.R. takes his grown son Kermit big-game hunting in Africa and exploring a treacherous river in South America. T.R. almost died of fever and Kermit almost drowned in a whirlpool. The summer I was 10, our family drove across the U.S. Dad was planning a new college library, so we stopped at every college and toured its library as Dad collected ideas. I almost died, too. Of boredom in the periodicals room of Eastern Montana State.
The comic book’s pages were brittle, so I leafed gingerly. Each panel was an old friend. (“Bully for you, Kermit! We’ll make soup out of this monster’s trunk.”)

“Well, Dad,” Wendy persisted, “Is it any good?”
“Oh, it’s good,” I said. “And I’ll read it to you. But first there’s something we ought to do. Follow me.”
A carnival had taken place the night before in the park across the street, and the police had left behind yards and yards of that yellow plastic tape they use to control crowds. I tore off a dozen 15-foot lengths of it and tied the streamers to our wrists and ankles and into our belt-loops. Wendy was mystified. “Now what?” she asked.   “Now I’ll race you across the field.” As we ran, the yellow tape fluttered out behind us like flames, flashing a luminous amber in the late-afternoon sun. Wendy waved her arms to make looping spirals. The whole effect was even better than I’d imagined when I’d first laid eyes on all that tape. We felt as though we had wings, and it took an effort to stop running.

Well, not everyone can be Teddy Roosevelt, but it’s still possible to show the wee ones a good time without showering them with gifts of loaded firearms and live buzzards.

By distributing the children to the places designated by Betsy, I’d be setting into motion a fragile chain of events that would provide some level of supervision for each child while my wife and I were at work. At noon Brittany’s mother would take Brittany and Sally to kindergarten. At 3 p.m. Rachel, who attends the same K-8 school as our two older children, would rendezvous with them at the school’s flag pole and walk them home and babysit them. At 4 p.m. Gayla, a woman who watches a half-dozen kids in her apartment all day, would deliver Wendy, age 2, into the youthful custody of Rachel at our house. Around 6, Betsy or I would come home, pay the necessary ransom, and take over. Whew!

When we decided to have kids, it never occurred to me that we’d have to know where each kid is and what she’s up to 24 hours a day for the first 17 years of her life. (It’s a job even the FBI wouldn’t undertake without lots of unmarked sedans, plenty of guys in suits and gallons of black coffee in Styrofoam cups.)

So Betsy pieces together the arrangements, with me her willing stooge. But at any time, the sudden illness of a babysitter could send Betsy’s daily plan plunging toward the sawdust like a trapeze artist who suddenly finds herself all alone in midair.

Another time that carefully wrought plans come apart is when a child says the magic words: “I’m sick.”
Our kids are now 8, 12 and 15, and only the youngest – Wendy – needs an attendant at home when she’s sick. The other two are OK alone, and are, in fact, professional babysitters themselves. Unfortunately little Wendy doesn’t like school and attempts to miss as much of it as possible. She is aided in that effort by an imagination that can exaggerate minor discomfort into something that calls for a medevac helicopter. “My throat feels like it’s crammed full of knives!” she’ll say.

(If I stayed home from work every time there were knives in MY throat, or icy hands squeezing my heart, or sulfuric acid burning out my stomach, or iron bands tightening around my skull, my boss would seldom get to see my brave little smile.)

But children deserve special consideration, even ones who can’t be trusted. One Monday morning last month Wendy, now a second-grader, seemed to be running a fever of 120 degrees. I’m no doctor, but she didn’t look THAT sick. It turns out she’d been holding the thermometer against a light bulb.

To test her sincerity, I’ll say, “You know, if you stay home from school, it means you’ll have to do nothing but lie moaning in your bed all day with only tea and chicken broth to eat.”

If she can accept that, Betsy and I try to decide which of us would be less damaged professionally by taking a day off from work. I’m on a razor’s edge here. My boss must believe that I take my job seriously, and my wife must believe that I take HER job seriously. And somewhere, nearly lost in all these practical considerations, is our desire to give a sick child every possible comfort.

The extent of our confusion was dramatized last Tuesday. Wendy came down to the breakfast table and claimed that her tummy contained red-hot harpoons (or something). My wife and I were exchanging dubious looks prefatory to deciding whose boss we would disappoint, when our sixth-grader Sally staggered downstairs. She blew her nose, coughed wetly into a tissue, and said, “I feel terrible. Can I stay home with Wendy?”

Betsy and I looked at each other with happy surprise and said, “YES!” (It was not a great moment in parenting, but on a strictly tactical level, the toast had indeed landed butter-side up.)

Rick can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com.

Back then, I’ll admit that I had been yearning for the past, the days I’d grown up in…

• When kids played ball whenever they felt like it and for as long as they felt like it, without insurance, umpires, referees, spectators or other adult involvement.
• When you could admire a TV cowboy without being forced to acknowledge that cowboys were actually uncouth, alcohol-abusing, tobacco-enjoying rednecks who were gleefully taking part in genocide.
• When toys were toys. Baseball cards, comic books, dolls and stuffed animals were not purchased for preservation under plastic, but for actual consumption by kids with grimy and active hands. (Have you heard a baseball card popping against the spokes of a bike lately?)
• When kids would disappear for an afternoon and you could feel confident they’d show up for supper.

I also missed the real materials – the steel cars, leather baseball gloves, wooden bats and canvas tents. And as more time is spent staring at video screens, our kids will miss the real sensations of a non-digitized adventure, whether it’s falling into a creek, reading a book under a tree, or throwing clods of dirt at their friends.

Could be I’m just romanticizing my own long-gone youth. Back when I had no past, and was consequently a creature of the present.  With a few exceptions, we parents are creatures of the past. We were shaped during our Wonder Years to function perfectly in those times, whether they were the ‘50s or the ‘70s.  And then those times went and changed, and we’ve been off-balance ever since.

But our formative influences aren’t wasted if we drag some of the past along with us. So my own strategy for dealing with the future is to drag along as much of the past as possible.

Here are my New Year’s Resolutions:

• Once a month, as a spiritual “re-centering” exercise, I’ll watch an old movie starring James Stewart, Kirk Douglas, Fess Parker or John Wayne.
• Whenever I am going to confront someone tough, I will picture Gary Cooper in “High Noon” (1951). If my foe is really tough, I will invoke Tarzan (as written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912) or “Dirty Harry” (as played by Clint Eastwood in 1971).
• I will require that any boy who comes to pick up one of my daughters for a date must creep out of his car, slither up the front steps and knock on the door. Eye-contact will win him a hearty handshake.
• I will get my hair cut by a barber who would laugh at anyone asking for an appointment.
• I will use good old words like “library” and “hospital” and “prison” and reject new juiceless terms like “media center” and “medical center” and “correctional facility.” And every so often I will make reference to “Red China,” and use the word “gay” to mean joyous.
• When a homework assignment requires one of my kids to bake a cake in the shape of Sri Lanka or render her spelling words in pieces of pasta, I will phone the teacher and ask why.– I will stare at people who have pierced their noses, tongues or eyebrows. I can’t believe they do it for beauty’s sake, but I CAN believe they do it to disturb me. It’s only polite to let them know it’s working.
• I will carry the 20th-century standards and attitudes of my father ever-deeper into the 21st century. I’ll try to keep alive his respect for civility, culture and knowledge and his old-fashioned common sense. (When appropriate, I’ll say things like: “Liars need good memories” and “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” When someone “ought to be horsewhipped,” I will say so.) Dad’s sayings reflected his own upbringing, including the teachings of HIS father – a man who’d spent his own Wonder Years in Russia, without electricity and indoor toilets and not even knowing he ought to have them. It can be a good and steadying thing to drag the values of our ancestors behind us in a long line that disappears back into the distant past. Like a sea anchor that helps keep a storm-blown ship from going too far off-course.
• And above all, I will refuse to be intimidated by The Future. Honestly, I really don’t think it has arrived yet.

(I was just kidding about the robots bringing me snacks.)

Rick can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com

Sally was excited. In fact, we both were, envisioning summer canoe trips as something special we could do together every year. But as July neared, she grew apprehensive. “I’m afraid we’ll run out of food and starve to death,” she said. “I mean, there are no stores right along the river, are there?”

It made sense. In our disorganized household, around dinnertime my wife Betsy or I will go to the supermarket and buy something for supper with no more forethought than a dog knocking over a garbage can. Sally couldn’t picture another way.

“Not a problem,” I told her. “We’ll make a list of what we want for two breakfasts, three lunches and two dinners, and buy what we need before we go.”

In my younger days, I’d been on many canoe trips – all poorly planned. The most memorable was a four-day trip on which a pal and I set out with only two cases of beer, a big box of apples from my back yard, and a vague notion that we would somehow “live off the land.” Privation ensued.

When the big day came, Sally and I tied the boat onto the roof of the car, and my wife drove us about 60 miles upstream. About to shove off, we discovered that the cooler containing half our food, had been left at home. Oops. “What’ll we do?!” Sally asked, her worst fears suddenly justified.

“We’ll make peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and open a can of beef stew for supper,” I said. “We’ll stop at a town along the way and buy more food for tomorrow night’s dinner. I’ve got $15.” She hugged her mother as though for the last time and clambered reluctantly into The Titanic.

But we had a great day. When we drifted, I read to Sally from “Huckleberry Finn.” When we paddled, we played at being Tom and Huck. Everyone we passed was either a pirate or an Indian. We ignored the jet-skis.

That night we camped on a wooded island. It’d been years since I’d pitched our tent and I’d forgotten how. I mistook its floor for its roof, so I invested the first 45 minutes unwisely. Sally has always been a stern (but fair) judge of parental competence and my hour-long, trial-and-error way of putting up the tent worried her. And the saggy result offered no reassurance. That night as we lay in our sleeping bags, the night bugs and various rustlings and scamperings scared Sally. But all she said was, “Gee Daddy, it’s hard to go to sleep with so many interesting noises.” I showed her my Bowie knife in case something REALLY interesting came along.

The next morning we breakfasted on toast and then paddled along to a riverside town to buy groceries. The fact that we’d spent right down to 11 cents frightened Sally. Trying to calm her anxiety, I said, “We can eat like pigs at every meal, and still not finish all this food. We don’t need any more money. Let’s shove off.” I tossed the coins into the water. Sally stared after them.

We had another companionable day of fun. But at 6 p.m., just as I was looking for a camping place, Sally said, “My tummy hurts, and I feel like I’m going to throw up. I want to go home. I want Mommy,” and tears streamed as from a ruptured hull. It was homesickness, sudden as a heart attack. It would’ve been nice if my wife could drive up and rescue us, but I knew she’d gone out-of-state and wouldn’t be home until much later. Sally gripped her stomach and wailed, “I WISH THIS WAS JUST A BAD DREAM!”

Subduing my anger to mere unhappiness, I said, “OK, we’ll keep going, and I’ll get you home sometime tonight.”

Sally almost smiled. She picked up her paddle and got busy. At dusk she put on her life jacket and we paddled on. A bat came out of the gloom and flapped around us. Totally creeped-out, I wanted to scream.

“Is that a bat?” Sally asked.
“Yep,” I said forcing myself to sound casual. “Just one of nature’s creatures out shopping for bugs to eat. Just checking us out.”
“Oh,” she said, taking my fake calmness for the real thing. She settled down in the bow of the boat and went to sleep as I paddled on and on. The water was ink, the shoreline a shadow. Around midnight I saw the lights of our house. I beached the boat and helped Sally stagger up the riverbank and into her own bed.

Even though my bungling had a lot to do with it, the fact that Sally could get homesick during what I’d seen as 24-karat Quality Time hurt my feelings. Unloading the canoe in the darkness, I picked up the little “Sally” paddle. My angry Inner Brat told me to throw it into the black river.  Instead I took it indoors, wiped it off, and hung it back up on Sally’s wall. The paddle wasn’t a trophy, but it was a souvenir of an adventure shared, and that’s something. Maybe we’ll try it again in a few years.

I would’ve liked to answer: “Don’t you know? THIS is where money comes from. Whenever grownups run low on money, they just drive to this bridge, put out a hand and one of those people fills it with money. Is this a wonderful world or what?”

My real answer was factual. I am too much my father’s son to be silly about money. His credo was work hard, spend wisely, and save the rest. Buy a lottery ticket? He would just as soon try to steal a suitcase full of cocaine from Colombian drug lords.

As Father’s Day approaches, I’d like to propose a toast to the man who taught me the value of a dollar and, inadvertently, the value of words. His financial training was fairly simple: Whenever I’d been extravagant, he’d say: “It must be nice to have a rich father.” His remark contained the whole Ted Epstein saga. If he had stated it directly, it would’ve gone like this:
My parents were poor immigrants. We sweated blood every day in our luncheonette and lived in a tiny apartment. I never had money to squander the way you are squandering mine. I worked hard and concentrated on my studies. I served eight years in the Army and almost as many in college, and I’ve been busting my hump at a demanding job ever since. All to produce the disappointing result we see here – spoiled sons who take the fruit of that struggle and throw it away on tacky plastic streamers to attach to their handlebars. I only WISH I had that kind of economic setup, except that I would’ve had the strength of character to save that money for college rather than fritter it away on ephemera (short-lived stuff) and frippery (cheap finery). (These are the kind of words that Dad used all the time.)

Of course Dad didn’t SAY all this; it was just THERE, rolled up inside the “rich father” remark, like tape inside an old videocassette. One minute I’d be standing in the driveway jazzing-up my bike, doing my own small bit to make the world a more beautiful place, and the next I’d be clobbered with Dad’s version of “Godfather II,” prolonged sepia-toned flashbacks and all, condensed into that one ironic sentence.

Then Dad would go read his newspaper (and maybe garner additional cool words), and I’d continue attaching the streamers, aware that I’d made a foolish purchase.

But on another level I would be thinking: “Y’know, it IS nice to have a rich father.” We had a big house, steak for dinner, ample allowances, and had been promised a free ticket to whichever college we could squeak into. But my brothers and I wished we had an even-richer father so we could have servants, horses, vacations on the French Riviera, and silver-fox tails for our bikes.

My big brother Steve, like many firstborns, felt deep down that he was royalty who had been temporarily hidden among commoners. For Steve, mere riches would not suffice; he wanted a throne, a crown and groveling subjects. Whenever his arrogance showed, Dad would accuse him of being “born to the Purple.” So while Prince Steven waited for his real parents to send for him, little brother Jim and I waited for Dad to show a little more ambition and boost us into the upper crust.

But Dad was looking downward instead of upward. “Come here,” he said one day, inviting me into a bathroom. “See that?” he asked, pointing to the sink where a thin stream of water flowed from the faucet. “That’s MONEY going down the drain.” Dad was best with irony, but he was no slouch with metaphor.

Electricity was another sore point. Every evening, Dad would quietly patrol the house turning off lights in unoccupied rooms. But when he was off-duty, away at a meeting or a viewing, he’d come home to find, as he put it, “every light in the house BLAZING!” I got the point, of course, but I liked the exciting verb; it made me feel like we were in a palace that was brilliantly illuminated with candles and torches, ready for Steve’s coronation or something.

Although Dad’s frugality eventually soaked in, I also developed an appreciation of the off-beat expressiveness of his speech and also a general love of language. Working for a newspaper, I make my living with words and, although I don’t make nearly as much money as my dad used to, we’re doing OK.

Now I have three kids of my own who spend my money like sailors in port and who loll about like guests of honor at The Festival of Running Water and Eternal Light. And I say the same corrective things to them that my dad used to say to me in hopes that they’ll absorb the concepts in time to instruct my grandchildren. But I have held one thing back:
I never tell them how nice it was to have a rich father.

Rick can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com

Out by the fire one of the guys finished telling an amazing story about a carpenter on his crew who’d quit to become a registered nurse. (“… and he was the best millwork man I ever knew.”) After discussion faded, there was silence. The mood was mellow, but even so, no one was eager to follow a great tale like that. Finally I said quietly, “I’ve got a story,” and told this one:

The summer after high school I met a girl named Suzie. We were in love all through college and came awfully close to getting married. The feelings were there, but we really weren’t suited for a life together. When it came, our breakup was stormy, painful and it took months to complete.

But I kept in touch with Suzie’s parents, even after they’d moved 100 miles away – Christmas cards and a phone call every few years. My wife Betsy knew about this, and was amused.

(“Amused?” asked one of the dads. “Yes,” I said.)

So, anyhow, I was chatting with Suzie’s mom on the phone a couple months ago, and I updated her on my kids. “I want to see them!” she said.

“I guess you never will,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” she said, “Why don’t you and Betsy come here for a visit?”

“I doubt Betsy will go for it, but I’ll ask,” I said.

But Betsy surprised me by saying OK. And then flabbergasted me by saying she wouldn’t even mind meeting Suzie. After a few phone calls, it was arranged for Suzie and her family to be at her parents’ house for dinner on Sunday.
I looked in the mirror. Suzie’s boyfriend of long ago had been a fairly presentable specimen. But the years and too much pie had changed me. Also, I had failed to make much money. Suzie has a big government job and her husband is a lawyer or something. My level of success would be demonstrated by the car we’d be arriving in. I had a choice of vehicles: decrepit or shabby.

After a couple of days of agonizing along these lines, I asked myself the purpose of the meeting. Was it to make time with Suzie? No. Was it to make her wish she’d married me? Not really. I only wanted to satisfy my curiosity, see an old friend, and extend a feeling of good will that would make our four-year romance something better to look back on. A modest mission, and I could accomplish it looking ugly and driving a rusty wreck.

The encounter itself was anticlimactic. Suzie still looked good to me, although like most people our age, she was no longer 23 years old. Her husband didn’t attend; he was either lying low or busy making money. Suzie was driving a brand-new forest-green Volvo SUV. Her daughters and mine hit it off and played nicely together. I had worked hard to build a wall in my mind between the two main women in my life, and being in the same room with them, was disconcerting. It kept shocking me – Oh no! They’re both here!

Suzie and Betsy did not engage in a hair-pulling contest for my favors. In fact, there seemed to be no tension between them whatever. Suzie was charming and appropriately impersonal. No one could’ve guessed our past from our behavior. We both had our defenses up, and it was like a polite fencing match without thrusts.

Toward the end of our visit, I gave her older daughter a nice edition of “The Land of Oz,” a book Suzie and I had read aloud to each other in lovey-dovey mode way back when. (I did not like admitting this to the guys around the campfire.) “What a nice present!” said Suzie with automatic politeness. And when she saw the title, she gave a quiet but genuine, “Oh!” A gentle ambush; small but gratifying.

Driving home on the interstate, kids asleep in the back seat, I tried to imagine myself visiting an old boyfriend of Betsy’s. I wouldn’t have done it. I looked at Betsy. “Why’d you go along with this?” I asked her.

Her small smile was illuminated by oncoming headlights, and she said, “I like an adventure.”

The men around the campfire, who had been spellbound by this story-without-climax, were quiet, each thinking about his own past. Finally one of them said, “That situation. There’s no RIGHT way it could’ve gone. I’d never have tried it. But your WIFE…” Words failed him, and he and the others shook their heads in wonder at the self-assurance of the woman I’d married.

Sometimes Sally’s older sister Marie would join us, and sometimes I’d tell Marie a separate story about something else. Telling stories while lying in my bed, in the dark, with a child snuggled against each shoulder, is about as cozy as home life can get, and I recommend it. And you don’t have to be a talented raconteur to pull it off. I’m not, but I have developed a few helpful techniques:

NEVER INVENT WHAT YOU CAN STEAL. A good easy recipe is to insert the child into a nursery classic to create “Sally and the Three Bears” or “Marie and the Billy Goats Gruff.” Or you can borrow millions of dollars’ worth of characters from Disney, Warner Bros. or anyone else, use them in the dark of night for the amusement of your kids, and all the high-priced legal talent in the world can’t make you pay a penny in licensing fees. (If anyone asks, you didn’t hear it from me.)

LET THE LISTENER PARTICIPATE. Give the child a speaking part, let him provide some detail, and invite him to decide which way the story will go when you get to a turning point.

But if you give away too much creative control, a kid can shut your story in a big box, padlock it, drop it into the sea and then complain that it’s not going anywhere. One night I was trying to tell Marie a story about naughty beaver children who clogged-up a toilet with paper towels, but she blocked my every move. She knew what I was up to and wouldn’t even let me get my beavers into the bathroom. I think the toilet was an object of mystery for Marie, and she didn’t want to anger it. When you have an audience of one, you have to respect her sensibilities. I sent the beavers outside to gnaw down lifeguard stands.

TAKE A FAMILIAR PET AND MAKE IT TALK. Our neighbors’ dog Cinnamon is the only surly Irish setter I ever met. Besides snarling at me whenever I go outdoors, he thinks we run a restaurant. Our trash cans are the all-you-can-eat buffet and our yard is the rest room. I could make the kids squeal with mirth just by soliloquizing in a growly voice about the tasty trash treats he’d find in the course of a midnight raid. (In the morning, the kids would awaken to find our lawn strewn with garbage, and it was like discovering Santa’s cookie crumbs on Christmas morning – corroboration of a magical world.)

FIGHT TO KEEP YOUR STORIES LEAN. A detail or characters inserted frivolously into a bedtime favorite can’t be easily omitted and your story will end up with more useless decoration than the uniform of a South American dictator. A case in point is The Green Man Goes Trick-or-Treating. I let Sally have too much input and soon the Green Man was going door-to-door with a vast entourage of superfluous characters, which included Whitey the Talking Cat, Quacky the Talking Duck, SpongeBob, Pinocchio, President Obama’s daughters and The Bad Boys (two nameless boys who throw rocks at anything they see and can absorb an infinite amount of scolding without improvement).

Then, as the Green Man and his associates went foraging across town, Sally would want to add stops to his itinerary. But I caught on to this early and managed to hold it firm at 11 visits. Sallie got to specify what kind of candy they collected at each place, and she was as serious about it as if she were selecting her first wedding gown.

WHEN A STORY BOGS DOWN, HAVE SOMEONE TURN INVISIBLE. This always loosens up a story, but don’t over-do it. One night I turned EVERYONE invisible, and they ran around bumping into each other. It was a cute piece of business, but the idea of invisible people trying to see each other made Marie’s head hurt and she demanded that I try something less strenuous.

Even though anyone can entertain a child or two at bedtime, a few amateurs have made it big. A.A. Milne used to amuse his son Christopher Robin with tales of the lad’s teddy bear, and during World War One a British soldier named Hugh Lofting sent the first Dr. Dolittle stories home to his kids.

My own bid for fame and fortune is almost ready: The American Dog series will include: “Meet Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon’s Night Out,” “Cinnamon Never Learns” and finally “Cinnamon Shot by Neighbor.” We could market it with a stuffed animal, heavily accessorized. Publishers, call my agent.

Rick can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com.

Wendy reddened, tears welled in her eyes, and she said, “I was cutting the label out of it…” I understand that to a child’s sensitive skin, a tag inside a garment feels like a double-edged razor blade. And over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at removing them. But this $48 dress looked as though Wendy had draped it over a tree stump and thrown tomahawks at it.

I sat down on a chair so I’d be the same height as the culprit and said, “Look, you’ve cut up a brand-new dress and that makes me very mad. But if you promise you will Never Ever Again cut a tag out of your clothes, I won’t yell at you or punish you.” She nodded in earnest agreement.

I picked up her new sweater figuring it would hide the hole, but it too had undergone the tomahawk treatment. I looked at Wendy and she shrugged; the damage had been done back when chopping holes in new clothes had still been perfectly OK.

With three kids, ranging from age 7 up to 14, I’ve made the Never Ever Again speech many, many times.

As a service to the readers of this fine publication, I’ve boiled down 14 years of Never Ever Again speeches into a few plainly worded ordinances. You’ll want to read these rules publicly a few times a year, and keep them posted in a prominent place.

GROOMING

• Do not cut your own hair.
• Do not cut your sibling’s hair.
• Do not paint your lips with markers.

GRACIOUS LIVING

• Do not take garbage out of the compost heap and use it as doll food.
• Dead animals are not toys.
• Do not use yogurt as paint.
• Do not make ink out of crepe paper. (This should only be done in a tile-lined lab by trained technicians in disposable clothing.)

INDOOR LIVING

• Do not draw or write on the walls.
• Or doors.
• Or window sills.
• Do not hang on cabinet doors.
• Never put chalk in the toilet.
• Or soap.
• Do not fill a sink with water, blow a bubble-gum bubble, float it in the water and pretend that it’s a whale and that a large needle with thread attached is a harpoon. (Sounds harmless, but everything in the room gets soaked somehow.)

CULINARY RULES

• Do not put buttered bread into the toaster. (Yes, the toast it produces is unparalleled, but butter will drip down inside the toaster and just when someone is poking a fork in there, the toaster will burst into flames.)
• Do not use the dryer to defrost meat – especially hamburger. (Whoever didn’t tell me about this rule caused big trouble in my boyhood home.)

AVOIDING BLOODSHED

• Do not tease dogs or cats. But when you do, protect your face.
• Do not run with scissors. (This rule is not important, because by the time you realize your kids are old enough to run, they will have run off with all your scissors and lost them.)
• Do not lose the scissors. (You’ll want this law on the books just in case you are the first parent ever to catch someone in the act of losing your scissors.)

FIRE SAFETY

• Do not play with matches.
• Do not light candles in your room.
• Do not set off any kind of fireworks in the house. (And that includes, but is not limited to, taking a small plastic dog, fashioning balsa-wood water-skis for him, floating him in the bathtub, tearing open one end of a firecracker, attaching it to his back like a jet-pack and lighting it.)
• Do not put lighted candles on the Christmas tree. I don’t know anyone who has ever done this. It’s an admonition that I read long ago and it intrigued me that someone might be wild enough to try it. It was my favorite rule until I went to a Scandinavian Saint Lucia festival and saw something that inspires an even-better rule:   Do not wear lighted candles on your head.

So, there it is – a body of law accumulated at great expense all ready for implementation at your house. If it seems kind of grim and repressive, don’t worry, you’ll still have plenty of discussions like this:

DAD (with feeling): “Sally, don’t throw pillows at the lamp!”
SALLY (quizzically): “DON’T throw pillows at the lamp?”
DAD: “Right!”
SALLY: “Which lamp?”

Rick can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com.

The girls are now 7, 10 and 14 years old, and they are all in love. With a 15-year-old named Pete.

I’d been hearing about Pete for a year or two, always as an object of fun among Marie and her middle-school girlfriends. Whenever they’d see him wearing his yellow coat, they’d holler at him, “Hey, Banana Boat!” Pete didn’t mind. Marie made comic-books of his fictitious adventures. She’d show him the cartoons amid general razzing from her gal-pals, which he accepted good-naturedly.

Then last summer Pete began hanging around our end of town, joining in the nightly neighborhood games of Flashlight Tag. And by mid-July he and Marie were “an item.”

I remembered back to some very effective pre-emptive supervision I received from younger siblings of my girlfriends, especially from the king of them all, Eddie Johnson, age 10. Because I found his big sister Peggy to be an object of wonder, Eddie found me to be an object of wonder – more fascinating than a burning building. Throughout that long, hot summer, Eddie was always so close to us that I could’ve reached out and throttled him – an idea almost as exciting to me as holding his sister’s sweaty hand in mine. Because of Eddie’s unblinking surveillance, very little transpired between his sister and me beyond the sweaty handholding. (If Eddie isn’t right now somewhere sitting in an unmarked car sipping coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, and looking up at someone’s apartment, the world of law enforcement has been cheated.)

Deciding to harness some of that little-sib energy, I asked my youngest daughter Wendy to “keep an eye on Marie and Pete and let me know if they do anything interesting.” Would she? It was like asking a dog to bark at company.

One night, after I’d called everyone in, Marie pleaded, “Dad, can’t you make Wendy and Sally leave us alone? Sally is mean and rude to Pete, and Wendy is always tagging along and showing off and pestering us.”

“Well,” I said, “Wendy is just doing her job. But I’ll talk to Sally about being mean.”

“Dad,” she said, “It’s not as simple as that. Wendy and Sally totally can’t leave Pete alone. They have issues.”

She’s right; they like Pete, too. To tell the truth, I also like Pete. He’s polite and personable and looks me in the eye. A product of his time, he is unable to call me “Mr. Epstein,” so he calls me nothing. At least he doesn’t call me “Rick,” and I appreciate that.

But it wasn’t until last Monday night that I was really swept off my feet. I came home from work and found him visiting. “Would you like to join us for dinner?” I asked.

“No thanks, I already ate,” he said.

It wouldn’t do to have him lurking around the living room during supper, so I said, “Well, come sit at the table and stare at us while we eat.” He joined us and I peppered him with questions about school and parents. Usually, teenagers under interrogation are as tight-lipped as captured spies, but Pete responded pleasantly and informatively.

After dinner, it was Marie’s turn to do the dishes. Because she had company and usually does such a poor job anyway, I was tempted to excuse her. But I remembered happy Sunday mornings from my youth, standing at the sink in the church kitchen beside the lovely Peggy Johnson, drying coffee cups as she handed them to me.

I said to Pete, “You can help Marie with the dishes if you want,” and handed him a dish-towel. They were in the kitchen for a long time, and when they’d finished there wasn’t a spoon or a crumb out of place.

“Dad,” Sally said, “When are you going to get that big ugly desk out of my room?” She’d been wanting me to do that for a couple of months, but it was at least a two-man job.

“Pete,” I said. “Want to give me a hand?”

“No problem,” he said cheerfully, and even took the heavier end as we lugged the oaken man-killer up narrow stairs to the attic.

I had never considered there might be an up-side to this boyfriend business. Pete may have fantasies about my daughter that I don’t like to think about, but he’s fulfilling a major fantasy of mine – having a kid in the house who does what I ask him to.

* * *

Rick can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com