The Best Story Assignment I Ever Gave Out

This just in:

“In the intro to your book One Day, which is the finest work of non-fiction I have ever read, you mentioned five stories of five random people in the phone book where your writers hammered a nail in and wrote a story about whoever it stopped on. You did it as an editor at The Post. I'm curious if these articles are still available somewhere, since they seem intriguing.”

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First, thank you for the compliment.

Yes, this was, in a way, the impetus for “One Day,” for which I spent six years researching the events of a single, seemingly ordinary day — December 28, 1986 — having chosen the date at random by drawing numbers from a hat. The idea was that in the hands of a good writer, and because of the drama and chaos of life, nothing is ordinary.

Years before, as an editor, I had given the phonebook assignment to five of the finest writers at the Style section of The Post, with one instruction only: “Do not feel constrained by the ordinary rules of conventional journalism. Write the hell out of it. Just kick ass.” They did.

I’m giving you all of them here. They are all terrific. All the writers worked magic. I think that if I had to choose, my favorite among all of them is the last, by Peter Carlson, because he crafted a story about absolutely nothing, and also absolutely everything.

This will take a while to read. You might apportion them one at a time.

But first, today’s Gene Pool’s three extranious Gene Polls.

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March 15, 1997

True Lives; Is Every Man Everyman? Is Everyone a Story? We Drove Nails Into the Phone Book, and Went to Find Out.

There are eight million stories in the naked city.

That was the sign-off line for the 1948 movie "Naked City" and the TV series it spawned. It was an arresting premise: Everyone has a story to tell. All lives are interesting.

It makes for good fiction. Is it true?

On Monday, five writers each took a nail and hammered it into a phone book. Where the nail stopped, the writer started. That person would be the story, so long as he or she agreed to be interviewed.

We used phone directories for the District, Northern Virginia, and Prince George's and Montgomery counties. We used nails from Strosnider's. We used a hammer from Hechinger. We used the stories as we found them: Ordinary. Unembellished. Riveting.

JOHN LIU: A NEW START

By Peter Finn

Afternoon fog hung low over the Golden Gate Bridge so no one saw her jump.

Some people walking on the beach on the Marin County side reported a body on the water. There was no ID in her clothing, just some car keys, and it was evening when the California Highway Patrol found her silver Volvo sedan in a parking lot used mostly by tourists.

Wife. Mother of two. Thirty-four. Immigrant from Hong Kong.

But in San Francisco, a town weary of suicides, Elina Liu was just another jumper; she didn't even make the papers.

Circumspect with his emotions, there is only a hint of distress -- a catch in his breath, a downward glance -- as John Liu, 45, recalls the death of his wife in 1991 and how, in flight from it, he found healing and love.

"I made a complete break, a transformation," he says, quietly at ease in conversation with a prying stranger. "There were too many memories and I wanted to change my life. To find new memories."

Six years later, he has moved across the country, changed careers and remarried.

But the past is not his enemy. He knows it cannot be exorcised either by time or place, only soothed, abated, made duller. Each day he pauses to think of Elina and prays that she has found peace.

"I know she suffered," he says. "She could not help {it}."

Liu was at home in San Jose with his 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter when someone from the coroner's office called. Officious but polite, the caller left no doubt. Liu turned to face his watching children, their fear palpable, and said, simply, that their mother was dead.

For months, Elina Liu had felt trapped inside a body she no longer recognized in a life she no longer cared for. The September before she killed herself she suffered a stroke. After a few days in a coma, she awoke to find herself unable to speak, hear or walk. Slowly, through months of excruciating rehabilitation, she regained some speech and could walk again with difficulty. But she was nearly deaf -- and permanently so.

One Tuesday morning -- June 18, 1991 -- she didn't go to work. Before that day, her husband recalled, she had talked about suicide, taken a few too many pills once and cut one wrist. He had sought psychiatric help for her, but to no avail. This summer day there would be no dry runs.

She drove north to the majestic suspension bridge that crosses the mouth of San Francisco Bay, a place where more than 1,000 people have leapt to their death. The fall takes four seconds. Around 2:40 p.m., police estimate, Elina climbed the 3 1/2-foot railing on the bridge's walkway, and left her children and husband behind.

Life's axis had suddenly shifted before for John Liu. Born in Taiwan, he left his homeland for the University of Virginia three days after his two-year compulsory service in the Taiwanese military ended. His marine division just missed going to Vietnam.

Liu had majored in geography as an undergraduate in Taipei, but switched to engineering in Charlottesville. He didn't like the subject or the Old Dominion and after three months moved to California to study computer science at the University of Santa Clara.

In 1977, on a trip to Yosemite National Park with a group of Chinese students, he met his future wife, an accounting major, who had emigrated from Hong Kong. They were married two years later as Liu began an 11-year career at various companies in Silicon Valley. He was a senior staff programmer at IBM when Elina killed herself.

"I wanted to get away from San Jose, from friends, from relatives," he said of the days and months following her death. He lost 30 pounds and despair allowed the thought of suicide to creep into his own mind.

"I would think of my children and know I had to go on," he says.

He decided to get out of the computer business and leave San Jose, but he wanted to find a good job so he could provide a secure future for his children. In March 1992, Liu was hired by the U.S. Customs Service in San Francisco.

His mother helped him raise his children there and, in time, Liu began to date again. In 1994, a friend suggested Liu call a Taiwanese woman who worked for a Japanese trading company in New York. Her name was Wen Ku. The friend thought they might be compatible.

"I thought, how can this work: New York-San Francisco," said Liu. "But I call her anyway. Why not?"

For three months, sometimes for hours at a time, the two talked on the phone -- about work, his wife, children, anything and everything. In early 1995, Liu was offered a temporary position in Washington with the Customs Service as an international trade specialist.

On his first weekend on the East Coast, he went to New York and met Ku in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. Tall and striking in a fiery red coat, Ku was much prettier in person than the one photo Liu had seen. Over the next two days, as she showed him around Manhattan, he was smitten.

The job in Washington became permanent. He moved his children east. The courtship with Ku, 36, continued in earnest. And that Thanksgiving, after parrying numerous earlier proposals, she finally agreed to marry him. The wedding took place last September. His children have come to love her, and she them. And the couple would like to have a third child together.

They live in a cul-de-sac in North Potomac, a quiet neighborhood. On a perfectly still, suburban night, over cups of sweet tea, with the sound of children in the background, Liu smiles effortlessly as he sits, unburdened, and talks with a visitor.

Life can almost seem fair.

But out in the garage is a small reminder of the frailty of happiness: the silver Volvo sedan.

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TOM JOHNSON: SOLITARY SOLDIER

By Laura Blumenfeld

—.

Three needle pricks crawl up his arm, like red ants on a sidewalk. Every evening, a syringe nips his pale biceps; every morning, his butt. The sting releases 44 units of insulin into his blood.

Tom Johnson, 31, wasn't always a diabetic. It wasn't part of the plans he made as a boy, lying on his back in a meadow.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Tom would count out loud in the meadow by the river. He was dressed in green, playing war. His friend had just shot him dead. He had to lie still for 10 Mississippis. The ground was damp and smelled like rotten carp. Mosquitos swarmed around his nose. But Tom lay there happily, picturing his future -- as a fighter pilot or a battleship commander.

Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi. Six Mississippi. Tom itched to get up, to find his friend and shoot him. He was a deadeye, even then. He got it from his dad, a military man, who left their cramped house each day in a lime-green shirt and dark matte pants. His father served his country as an Army computer technician. Tom was going to be a real, mud-spackled career soldier.

Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi. Ten Mississippi. At last, Tom could pop up and pursue his friend -- the enemy.

Years later, at Fort Bragg, N.C., the enemy took shape as the Soviet Union. It was 1983, the waning days of the Cold War. Johnson enrolled in college, but only because he needed a degree to become an officer. He won an Army Achievement Medal. He became a second lieutenant, a rifle platoon leader in a unit deployable to central Europe in case of a Soviet invasion. The Russians, Johnson imagined, would be brutal; they would try to smother him with artillery and chemicals. A guy in Johnson's unit, who had a tattoo of a paratrooper skull with a knife in its teeth, predicted the Soviets would carve the tattoo from his arm and turn it into a wallet.

Johnson slept in the woods. He parachuted, landing on his back, and was dragged by high winds. He crouched behind his M16 one night on ambush patrol and calculated his pay -- a couple of cents an hour. It was one of the happiest times in his life.

Then his father died. Lung cancer.

"It's no big issue," Johnson says. He is sitting on his living room couch in Northwest Washington, one arm draped across the back. "Obviously it was painful, but it's not like it's the most devastating thing. Someone dies, you get over it."

He likes to keep feelings to himself. Whatever else is in there gets barricaded. He has a pleasant, forgettable face -- fair skin, straight nose, smudge-colored hair. He wears his green- and blue-striped Army Achievement Medal. It is tacked not to a uniform, but to the lapel of a professor's blazer.

Three months after his father died, junior year in college, Johnson lost his strength. He wasted from 160 to 130 pounds. Climbing a flight of stairs wiped him out. His thigh muscles felt like sludge, his veins like they were flushing molasses. Johnson went for a checkup. For the first half of his visit, the doctor chatted about the military; for the second half, after the blood test, about the need for Johnson to sign his resignation papers. His Army career was over; a soldier can't count on being fed at regular intervals during a war.

Ten thousand needle pricks later, Johnson is teaching international politics at American University. His walls are lined with books about the causes of conflict and their outcomes.

"All conflict lurks in the heart of human beings," the professor says. He wriggles his fingers and squeezes his toes inside his shoes, a constant habit, like a man whose suspects he is going numb. Marriage and children, he says, aren't for him. Writing academic articles keeps him content.

There are no lights on in the room. The blinds are half open, and the sun dodges clouds, flickering his face bright to dark. He digs through a desk drawer and finds his dog tags -- Johnson Thomas, O Pos, Roman Cath -- coiled next to a glucose tablet.

"That's all I ever wanted to be," Johnson says softly.

All around him in the living room, on his desk, on the shelves, on his computer, tiny plastic soldiers march. Johnson created them. He glued dozens of legs to torsos, arms to upper bodies, helmets to heads. He mottled their tanks red, green and brown, and painted their bullets gold.

On one stereo speaker trudges a 37mm antitank gun crew. Four soldiers drag the ammunition. A spotter peers through binoculars and identifies the target: Russian infantry. It is late winter-early spring, 1942, and the Germans are attacking Russia. In another corner, on a shelf, an armored reconnaissance unit drives toward Moscow. Mud sticks to the tank treads. One soldier grips a radio, listening to reports from forward units on the battlefield. Another man can see the Kremlin through his binoculars.

"I painted all their hands; I dotted the pupils in their eyes," Johnson says proudly. Their faces are identical, pleasant and forgettable: fair skin, straight nose, smudge-colored hair. "I tend to prefer them fighting the Soviets. I was trained to fight the Soviets."

Johnson is feeling lightheaded. A drop in blood sugar. He drinks some Mello Yello and the dizziness recedes. In a couple of hours, he will take his evening injection. He sticks a needle in a vacuum bottle of insulin and pumps air into the vial, an amount exactly equal to the liquid he withdraws.

"It's the law of conservation of mass," Johnson says. You can't just empty something. "You have to replace what you take."

If you don't fill the void, the bottle will crack.

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BRETT KILBOURNE: GOOD NEIGHBOR

By Karl Vick

The grand design of Monsieur L'Enfant goes to bloody hell on the 1700 block of V Street NW.

You think you're on Florida Avenue and, sure, it slides into U Street somewhere along here but this isn't U Street, is it? There goes 17th and the sign up ahead says Champlain but Champlain doesn't go through. It dead-ends into a block of row houses that are in a row, all right, but a row with the same sense of uniform logic as the streets.

The houses are on a diagonal and most of the houses are brick, but one has siding and several are painted -- not just pastels, primary colors, too; that one down toward the end is bright blue -- and the bunch in the middle of the block are made of stone. Not limestone or flagstone or any of your suburban shales, but brownstone, big, chunky blocks the color of the Industrial Revolution. They are that same rusty shade you see over on 16th Street, where a wall is all that remains of a castle that once loomed opposite Meridian Hill Park.

"This was a carriage house," says Brett Kilbourne. He's standing in a low-ceilinged room in one of the stone row houses, a house his father bought decades ago as an investment and Brett has lived in since 1988. It is a funky little place with three squatty stories and what real estate agents call "bags of charm," not to mention a basement, the only one in the bunch, to store the coal.

So there is a whole history that goes with the real estate, of how a senator's wife built the mansions out on 16th Street, which she succeeded in having renamed Avenue of the Presidents (at least for a year). It is history that can truthfully be described as diverting, and one of the things it diverts attention from is what has come since.

The neighborhood, in short, has been a jumble not only in terms of architecture but in terms of residents. People can live side by side and never be real neighbors. When Brett moved in his fiancee (now his wife), Justyna, they were welcomed most lustily by a woman who made it clear that she saw them as reinforcements for her side of a long-held grudge against another resident, one whose home she suspected was a refuge for rats. They had children. She did not approve.

These children sometimes played football in the street. Once, when the ball landed in the yard of another resident, the man picked it up, opened his knife, and plunged it into the football.

It was the kind of thing Mr. Wilson might do to Dennis the Menace, except that Mr. Wilson did not carry a knife, and Dennis was not black. And the kids were, along with about half the people on the block.

"That was race relations when we moved in," Brett says. "Now it's come full circle."

What changed things, from the Kilbournes' perspective, was a picnic. It happened last July 4 in front of their house. The whole neighborhood turned out, about 30 people getting along just fine. All because someone took the initiative.

"It was the old ladies, right?" Brett says, meaning three women who keep an eye on things from their porches.

Tyna looks at her husband.

"No," she says levelly. "It was really me."

They had been there together for three years, she explains, and knew that race wasn't the only thing keeping people at arm's length. The only words exchanged with one next-door neighbor were a challenge: The neighbors wanted the Kilbournes to cut down a tree whose roots they suspected were damaging their foundation.

"I knew some people won't like us just because we're white," Justyna says. "And some people won't like us because we're Brett and Tyna. But I really hate the idea that people don't like us when they don't even know us."

They are not what you'd call social activists. He grew up in Bethesda, she in New Jersey. They met at paralegal school, married five years later. Today Brett, 31, goes to law school as well as working downtown, and Justyna, 30, commutes to Virginia for her job in the computer software business. That's where she made the flier for the picnic.

"Come Out and Meet Your Neighbors on the Fourth of July," it said. Something like that. She gave one to each of the porch ladies. She gave one to the foundation worriers.

She invited the lady with all the kids. At first the woman just looked at her.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but no white person has ever spoken to me on the block before."

A few days later the phone rang. The same woman. "Do you mind if I bring my kids?" she said.

The Kilbournes grilled chicken. The porch ladies brought pasta salads and beans. The kids disappeared for a while, then returned with a platter of hamburgers that dripped so much grease into the grill it looked like the Olympic flame.

It was not something transcendent, just neighborly. Earlier in the year a gay couple had died, of the same disease, on the same day. One died in the morning, his lover in the afternoon. Remembering one of them at the picnic, a neighbor who had been drinking said, "He was a faggot, but he was a nice faggot."

Nearby, a gay couple heard the remark. And let it pass with a bemused smile.

"I didn't want to be real corny," Justyna says, a little catch in her voice. "But everybody was sitting -- was sitting in a circle."

Since that day, there have been invitations from other neighbors for dinner. A 9-year-old girl from down the block comes over at night to use the Kilbournes' computer. Justyna no longer feels uncomfortable going to the corner store at night, because she now makes eye contact with the men on the street.

Brett says that usually anyone who met your gaze on a city street would want something from you. "The picnic, like, for a moment, overcame that suspicion," he says. "Mutual suspicion."

He has kept out the American flag that he flew on Independence Day, and planted a little garden in the tiny front yard. The corn came up looking as strange as the block: "There were, like, five kernels, but they were huge."

His father kids them about it. "Is there a play or something," Justyna says. " A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'?"

Corn Grows on V Street.

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RICHARD BRADY: A TEACHER'S LESSON

By Elizabeth Kastor

The old man in the nursing home asked the question often.

"Who is Richard Brady?"

A math teacher, a father, your son -- none of the possible replies mattered to him. The facts could find no perch in Rudolph Brady's dying brain, and so his son Richard Brady became something less and more than all of them. He was simply the person in the room. The one who visited, who smiled, who held his wrinkled hand, rubbed his neck, took him on walks through a world that was no longer decipherable.

Alzheimer's disease had robbed the old man of his past and future. Now, Brady met his father in a permanent present, unconstrained by expectations. "He and I actually became very close," the son says. "He was probably my most important teacher in those last years of his life."

Richard Brady, 52, teaches math to the children of the driven elite of Washington at Sidwell Friends School. He and his wife and daughter have a home in Takoma Park in which there is no TV. He wears Birkenstocks and tie-dyed socks.

He watches the faces of the people in their cars as he drives to work, and notices the grim lines of the mouths, the joyless focus of the eyes. He smiles often, following the dictum of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk whose philosophy he follows. He tries to live slowly in a city and culture obsessed with speed. He tries to let life in.

So when a message on his voice mail invites him to give a stranger his life's story, he agrees immediately, cheerfully.

Brady is sitting on a bench in a courtyard at school. Teenagers walk by, sucking on fluorescent ice pops. The sunlight is sharp, the sky endless blue, the gusty air edged with cold. Magnolia buds swell on the tree he faces. Somewhere, colleges are deciding whom to admit and whom to cast aside. Somewhere, lawyers bill hours, hearings grow contentious, traffic jams gnarl the soul.

"My father was a businessman," Brady is saying. Rudolph and his family, assimilated Jews, got out of Germany just in time -- 1936. Austere, somewhat distant, he married, settled outside of Chicago and had two sons, Richard and Bob. "What I remember about him was he was always on the phone. He was a German immigrant -- I don't think he was ever very comfortable being an American father."

What he made of the pain that would come to his American family, Brady does not know. He is not certain what to make of it himself.

Bob is three years younger. The two brothers were both smart and competitive; Richard thinks Bob "defined himself in opposition" to him. If the older one excelled at math, the younger took up Latin. They were not particularly close, and by the time the cracks that developed in Bob's life became apparent, Richard had already gone to MIT and then graduate school at the University of Maryland.

The younger son had a chronic intestinal disease and probably a constellation of emotional problems as well. He dropped out of high school, moved to California and then Texas. He tried to treat his body through fasting. He went too far.

At 21, Bob starved himself into a coma. When he woke up, his brain was permanently damaged, and his future had shrunk down to a life of sheltered workshops and group homes.

Richard shows a picture of the brothers taken recently. Hearty and beaming, a large presence in the world, Richard has his arm wrapped around Bob. The younger brother is smiling too, but his body is slight and sunken in the couch, a fragile echo of the other man.

Richard looks straight ahead. "Where do you find the strength to open yourself to that kind of tragedy?" he asks. "This practice is really as much about me finding the way to feel that."

Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk whose teaching Brady follows, says that inner peace is no problem when you stand before the ocean or study a flower. But in the midst of the clattering world, to follow the "practice" of Buddhism, to maintain a "mindfulness" of the sacredness in every breath, every act -- that's the greater challenge. Nhat Hanh, nominated by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize, calls his approach "engaged Buddhism": Meditation does not lead away from the world but into it.

It took Richard several decades to find Nhat Hanh, moving through Quakerism along the way. Now he is a member of a lay order of Buddhists, travels to France to Nhat Hanh's retreat there and founded the Washington Mindfulness Community, a group of 40 or so who meet weekly to meditate and study. At Sidwell, he teaches conflict resolution along with the peculiarities of irregular polygons, and watches with hope the parade of young people with their Popsicles and insights. Teach and learn are the verbs that make his life move.

"When I was growing up, my father had many things to teach me about things like honesty, loyalty, generosity and thoroughness," he wrote before Rudolph Brady died in 1994. "Now, at age 79, he lives with Alzheimer's disease in a nearby nursing home and helps me with new lessons I struggle to learn today. My father recognizes little of the past and makes no plans for the future. Spending time with him only works to the extent that I am able to participate in the present moment."

His father might sleep through a visit, or flare into anger at an accidental bump. "Enjoying a visit with us one minute, he is uncomfortable and ready to leave the next," Richard wrote. "I must accept this just as I did his enjoyment."

Some of Rudolph's relatives found it too sad to visit: The Rudy they knew was gone. But his wife cared for him, as she did for Bob, until she was no longer physically able. And his son found that with effort, he could look at the man as he was, take pleasure in what he had to offer, in the tenderness a once-formal man was finally able to show. And the difficulties, the regrets -- that was all part of it, too.

"Joy and suffering are the two faces of the coin," he says. "And if you're not playing with the currency, you can't have either."

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TOM DOHERTY: OH DAD, POOR DAD

By Peter Carlson

They were hustling out of the house to get their picture taken -- a Doherty family portrait -- when somebody smelled something burning in the bathroom. Which was locked. From the inside. With nobody in there. Erin thought that maybe she'd left the curling iron on and maybe it had set something on fire.

Obviously, it was a job for Dad. Dad is Thomas Doherty. He takes care of stuff like this.

He told everybody to step back from the bathroom door, where they were standing and sniffing and speculating on exactly what might be burning. They stepped back and Dad raised his foot and gave the door a good, swift kick. It popped open and, sure enough, Erin had left the curling iron on.

So Dad had saved the day once again. But he wasn't celebrating. He was lying on his bed with a strange look on his face.

"What's wrong, Dad?" Patrick asked. "Are you mad?"

"I think I broke my foot," he said. He said it quietly. He is not a man given to embarrassing histrionics.

So while the rest of the family got their picture taken, Tom Doherty was in the hospital getting his foot X-rayed. And he was right, as usual. It was broken.

That's just one of the stories the Dohertys are telling about dear old Dad. They're sitting in their living room in Manassas, telling the most embarrassing stories they can remember about him. Like the story about the time he got on his brother's horse, claiming equestrian expertise, and then the horse took off like a bat out of hell and you should have seen Dad's face then. And the story about the time the sea gull carpet-bombed him at the beach house in Bethany Beach where the whole huge extended Doherty clan gathers every summer. And stories about his fondness for weird gadgets and Herculean home-repair jobs, some of which work better than others. And stories about how he sticks his old Navy boots in the fireplace every Christmas Eve and then makes fake Santa Claus tracks across the rug even though nobody in the family believes in Santa Claus anymore, except maybe him.

Tom Doherty listens but doesn't say much, his face getting a little red beneath his heavy black eyebrows.

He's 49, an Irish kid from the Pennsylvania coal country. He drove a coal truck as a teenager, then went to the University of Scranton, served in the Navy and in 1971 landed a job as an auditor at the Department of Health and Human Services. Now, 26 years later, he's HHS's director of office financial systems. Along the way, he married Marita "Ree" Burnett, the sister of a college buddy, and they settled in Manassas to raise their kids -- Patrick, now 25, Erin, 23, Meghan, 17 and Seamus, 16.

"We're a soccer family," Tom Doherty says.

Which is kind of ironic because Tom had never seen a soccer ball until Patrick started playing 20 years ago. Tom volunteered to help coach Pat's team and then started playing himself, just to get a feel for the game. Soon the whole family was playing, including Ree -- outdoor soccer in the spring and fall, indoor soccer in the winter. Between coaching and playing, they had games going seven days a week, sometimes several games a day. And there were tournaments in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and, one year, Meghan flew to England to play.

Tom remembers dropping her off at BWI Airport because afterward he immediately drove to Camden Yards, where the Orioles were playing the Yankees. The Dohertys had a couple of boys from Northern Ireland living with them that summer and the kids had fallen in love with baseball. So Tom circled the stadium over and over again, while the game blared out of the car radio and the kids hung their mitts out the window because Tom had convinced them they could catch a ball as it came flying over the grandstand.

"We're kidders in this family," Ree explains.

The Irish boys were part of a program that brings both Catholic and Protestant kids from the slums of Belfast and Londonderry to the United States. The Dohertys have hosted kids for the past three summers. They take them to ballgames and to Bethany and to the annual Doherty family reunions at a lake in the Poconos, where Tom teaches them how to fish.

"They'd never been fishing," he says. "They'd never picked up a worm -- street-tough kids but they didn't want to touch a worm." He likes the kids and enjoys their company, but he wonders if these six-week sojourns actually do them much good. "You're taking them out of the fighting and the poverty," he says, "but then you send them right back."

In the Dohertys' living room, the stories keep coming, most of them funny anecdotes about the foibles of Dad. Suddenly Patrick, who is lying on the living room floor, leaps up and scurries out of the room. A minute later he scurries back in, carrying an arm load of TV remote controls. He leans over and lets them plop onto a coffee table. There are seven of them, all Dad's. He has this thing about remotes. He seems to be searching for the ultimate remote, the one that will permit him to control the whole universe from his perch on a recliner in the family room.

"He keeps buying more remotes," Ree says.

"He went out to buy a dishwasher," Erin says, "and he came back and said, I got something extra.' And it was another remote."

Everybody's laughing and Tom's face is getting redder and redder, as if maybe he's not totally thrilled about this dissection of his eccentricities.

But of course there are worse things in life for a 49-year-old man than to have his wife and his four children gathered in his living room, all of them healthy, all of them laughing, all of them telling affectionate stories about him.

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That’s it. Hope you enjoyed them.

This is for Questions and Observations:

See you tomorrow in the Weekend Gene Pool.

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