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have any way of knowing if how they acted was normal or the working out of some primal curse. I did know that sometimes when I sat for dinner I sympathize with the Romans as the Visigoths perched on their city walls. I was astounded by how quickly a six-year old can transform a crisp salad into a pool of Russian dressing, a breakfast of eggs and toast into a Jackson Pollack spatter painting of yolk, white, and bread crusts, how the mouth takes on a clown shape made from the cosmetics of milk, meat juice, and ice cream. Eating with children was like watching the Visible Man's stomach in action, or like having a group reading of "I Am Joe's Stomach" from the Readers Digest.

They also developed flippancy into their own unique art form. Anything an adult said automatically registered as wrong, wrong-headed, or irrelevant. Any suggestion for doing something another way elicited either a "No" or a silence that said the comment doesn't even merit a response. They ridiculed anything serious, and took seriously anything ridiculous, especially if it was something like whining or cackling laughter guaranteed to make an adult bark like a rabid dog.

I understood all this theoretically: the need for self-assertion, appreciation of the individual ego, blah, blah, blah. But that psychological mantra evaporated rather quickly under the blare of two children wrestling in the back seat of the car over who should get the green M&Ms. At that point I didn't worry whether they'd write future best-sellers about how my authoritarian manner shriveled their potential; in my best drill instructor's voice I told them to shut up and move to opposite sides of the car and proceeded to lecture them on the Golden Rule and the survival value of silence. So much for allowing self-expression and personal creativity.

I knew I was a little envious of their coarseness, and a little resentful of having to shut off their valves. But when I saw the tub they'd just bathed in, which out-classed the silt build-up behind the Aswan Dam, and the dunes of wet towels all over the floor, I ordered them into the bathroom to clean up their mess. They grumbled, I grumbled. Later, we laughed as they went to bed. That just seemed to be the way things happened.

Overall, though, we had a very good life. I liked it because it came about through a lot of hard work that the kids and I had done to become friends. We had no pre-existing biological loyalty between us, as with father and child. We took no honeymoon truce, as

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