There Were Children in This House

In 1983, a young newspaper reporter (and astronaut wannabe) published an essay in which he imagined what it would be like to gaze into his soon-to-be-born child's eyes. Thus began "Thinking Allowed," a weekly column that, over the next twenty-five years, told the stories of an average family with two kids, a golden retriever and a mammoth station wagon with a drooping headliner. The newspaper columns were about the most ordinary things: a toddler foraging through the kitchen trash can, a two-year-old squeezing the last moments out of the day, a mom flinging together the secret ingredients for her Big Ol' Pot of Chili. From pediatrician visits to dance recitals to high school graduations, there wasn't much that didn't show up in the local paper. And while the articles were often humorous in intent, they sometimes strayed into the unguarded air space of a dad who grew sad at the thought of his daughters growing up too fast. Those stories, collected here for the first time, are snapshots of a most ordinary life-but a most happy life.