Looking back with Lot's Wife

November 15, 2000 The only good thing about having been lazy and shiftless and horrible in my youth is that I find it easier to talk to my kids. Nothing really shocks me that much because…how do I say this? I did it all. Or most of it. And now I own a house and have a happy marriage and vote and pay taxes. This is supposed to cheer you up if you’re feeling down about your kids and you were perfect in high school. I feel sorry for you if you got good grades and turned your stuff in on time and never got suspended. Really. It’s hard on you now, isn’t it? If you had goofed up a bit more, you’d have more confidence that things were going to be okay. I’m going to tell you some of the things I’m willing to tell people in print. For example, there was the smoking episode. I went to a private Catholic all-girls school way out in the boonies in Denver. There were fields all around and so during the spring noon hours, a group of us decided that it would be cool to lie out in the field, along a d...

November 1, 2000 The tragic flaw with dogs is dog hair. Our dog Eugene leaves a trail of little black reminders wherever he goes—I actually found a dog hair in the microwave last week and another in a bread pan I haven’t used in ten years. If you vacuumed our living room right now, you could pick up enough black dog hair to make yourself a dachshund Halloween costume. In fact, you could probably jut roll around our basement and come up covered with enough hair that you could tell people you’re a werewolf and they’d believe you. So last week, here comes my daughter-in-law with my first grandchild. To my way of thinking, she is the perfect baby girl. I wanted everything to be just right for her. I washed sheets and bedspreads, dragged the high chair out of the attic in the garage, single-handedly, which involved climbing down the ladder with it as far as I could and dropping it, covered with dust, on the top of the seat of the motor scooter. However, when she got here, to my acute dismay...