Upstate New York In The

I've Come To Realize That Making It Your Life's Work To Be Different Than Your Parents Is Not Only Hard To Do, It's A Dumb Idea. Not Everything We Found Fault With Was Necessarily Wrong; We Were Right, For Example, To Resent, As Kids, Being Told When To Go To Bed. We'd Be Equally Wrong, As Parents, To Let Our Kids Stay Up All Night. To Throw Out All The Tools Of Parenting Just Because Our Parents Used Them Would Be Like Making Yourself Speak English Without Using Ten Letters Of The Alphabet; It's Hard To Do.

Get A Good Dog. We Have Not Picked Up Food In The Kitchen In 15 Years.

When People Talk About Wanting To Have Children Someday, What They Really Mean Is That They Want Babies. Nobody Wants An Angry Adolescent. Nobody Wants An Obnoxious Seven-year-old Trying To Wear Out Dirty Words They Just Learned In School That Day. What They Really Want Is Cute, Adorable Babies Who Love You And Need You. The Bad Stuff Is Just The Price You Agree To Pay For Having The Good Stuff.

Middle Names Are Kind Of Like Vice Presidents: It's A Fine Distinction And Certainly An Honor, But You're Never Not Aware That Someone Else Got The Real Job.

In The Original Draft I Was 27 And Peter Was 55 In The Script. That's Not The Same As A Guy In His 40s And A Dad In The End Of His 70s. It's A Different Point In Both Our Lives.