I was thinking, reading the poem, that it sounded kind of odd and almost old fashioned to have a family you like, that all through the twentieth century people have been writing about unhappy families so much that the thought of positive ones has been lost somewhere, and that's really sad.

I blame Tolstoy. There is nothing banal about happy families. My grandfather was a psychologist and a photographer and was once so bored at a university commencement that he cut open a golf ball with a pocketknife and got liquid rubber all over the professor next to him (which promptly got him banished from the ceremony, so perhaps it wasn't such a mistake after all), and when my grandmother caught her hand in the wringer while doing the laundry, he wrote her a parody of "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" to cheer her up ("My Bunny Got Caught In The Wringer"), and on one of their earliest dates she performed "Anatole of Paris" on a street corner and attracted a considerable crowd. (She had met Danny Kaye. She described him to me as "redheaded and arrogant.") They were married three months after they met and spent their very first date trying to hitch-hike and because she had turned down the role in Junior Miss, his last words in an argument for years were always, "Listen, Fuffy—" They told great stories.