Cooking in the West

Every year right before Thanksgiving back when I was teaching English, I would ask all of my junior high students to write poems entitled, "I Am Thankful For..."

I always modeled a few lines of an example poem for them, so with a very straight face I would write, "My two delightful children, Bret and Brooke." This line was easier to write without smirking if neither of them had been in the sheriff's report or the principal's office in the past week.

Recently I was moaning about my failures as a parent/grandparent to my sister Jane, who had brains enough to have only had one child. (Although li...