Every day for the last couple of months I noticed that our family room
began the morning organized and clean, and became an unmitigated disaster
by mid-afternoon, with toys, cracker crumbs and beach towels strewn
about. Yet whenever I confronted my three children about the mess,
each would insist she had nothing to do with it. I found it all very
suspicious, so when my parents took the kids for four days last week I
decided to perform a little experiment that had some very interesting
results.

First I took an object from my bedside table (a book), brought it down
stairs and placed it on the kitchen counter, to simulate a hypothetical
scenario in which I might casually place an object on the kitchen counter
with the expectation that it would remain there until I decided to take
it away again. After noting the book's condition I went into the living
room, where I could observe the area from behind some French doors. After
thirty seconds I returned to the kitchen and discovered the following:
the book had not been lost between the couch cushions, or dropped in the
toilet, or crayoned in. Neither had it been burned, shredded, pummeled,
impaled, or befouled in any way. Some mysterious natural phenomenon had
caused it to remain exactly as I had left it.

I decided to push the envelope. I tuned the stereo to my favorite radio
station, began an elaborate project involving hundreds of fragile parts
and small, pointy tools, and set a glass of Hawaiian Punch on a bureau
at one end of the house and a favorite cream-colored shirt on a chair
at the other end. Then by God I went to lunch.

I ate sitting down. Heart rate a steady 60 beats per minute. Palms dry.
Hair on the back of my neck laying flat. Something strange caught my
eye at the far end of the table. It was my wife. She looked younger,
healthier. Not so hunched over and quivery. We talked. We smiled. We did
not dig our fingernails into the table, leap to our feet and run for a
roll of paper towels, or a straight jacket, or a tourniquet. We tasted
our food, basked in the quiet, and let the answering machine handle all
the frequent, urgent-sounding calls from New Hampshire.

We generally don't fall in love and marry a person because we think they
might be aces at breaking up shoe fights between crazed lunatics. But
once you have two or three kids running around robbing and pillaging your
home, everything that used to attract you to your spouse--great hair,
fluency in Norwegian, a dream to be the first person to drive across
Connecticut in a Fiat--all these become useless, annoying qualities. It's
the ability to force overalls onto a rabid goat while strapping it into
a car seat that you're really in the market for then, which may explain
why pregnant women have intense cravings for rodeo champions.

Anyway the kids came home with exciting stories of a three-alarm condo
fire and a small python they let loose in the New London Library, so they
seem to have enjoyed themselves. The important task this week was to get
them back into school and keep them there using the full extent of the
law if necessary. So far the local authorities appear to be cooperating.
I fear, though, that if their resolve weakens we can all expect further
delays in the Forest Ave construction project, which finally resumed last
week after several blasting charges were found in our zucchini garden.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset, where police have noticed that whenever
something in town goes missing, is defiled, or scribbled on, he hastily
calls his children indoors.