I was the firstborn in my family. My father changed jobs many times while I was growing up in Indiana, including a brief stint as a traveling salesman, but I'll always think of him as a production supervisor. He was a heavy drinker and a chain-smoker, who used to brag of saving money by lighting only one match a day. He taught me baseball, golf, and cooking, contract bridge and a bit of the German language. He was also a racist, a womanizer, and an old-fashioned American patriot, whose heroes were men's men, like Hemmingway and Patton. Our politics were almost always at odds.

Before my father died in 1982, his doctor said it was a race to see which internal organ would kill him first: his heart, his liver, or his lungs. The heart eventually won. He was 56. My younger brother and I saw to his cremation and later scattered his ashes in Arlington Cemetary with the help of our half-sister, whom my father had never helped raise. I was not particularly sad to see the old man go.

My mother, who had always been a full-time housewife, divorced and remarried while I was overseas in the Peace Corps. She also left the Episcopal Church and became a devout Jehovah's Witness. Before the death of her second husband in 1993, she settled for periods in Louisiana, California, and Hawaii, giving me plenty of excuses to visit different parts of the United States. I always admired her musical talent, her skills in painting and crafts, and her spirituality, which found its reflection in my own study of Zen Buddhism. I'm hopeful that her third marriage will last her the rest of her days.

In the meantime, however, I was starting a family of my own. I became acquainted with a hostess in a Japanese cabaret in 1976 and married her two years later. We had no plans for children, preferring a life of parties and world travel to diapers and PTA meetings. If I had a model for marriage at the time, it was Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald's, one wild fling after another. But in 1987, my first daughter was born, followed in 1991 by a second. Was it God's way of saying I needed more women in my life? Or just an instruction to slow the pace and settle down?

I cannot say parenthood has been easy for me. Like all fathers, I've had to learn from my own mistakes. I've also had to learn a lot about medicine and learning disabilities, as my youngest daughter suffers the effects of congenital cytomegalovirus. But no matter how rough the seas of parenting, there can be no better opportunity to relive childhood than through the experiences of our own children. I'm gaining a wealth of new material for my writing, too. For example, the story Right from the Start was based upon my elder daughter's entry into kindergarten, and child-rearing is the theme of several of my poems, such as Father Figure. and Eggs Tomorrow.