The American Spectator

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Mr. Homnick, you’re right. All happy families are happy in their own way — and when we in our turn begin to wax nostalgic about our families, we’ll realize in retrospect that we were happier than we thought we were at the time.

Despite the continuing Mommy Wars in which the stayathomes carp that working mothers are evil and the working mothers carp that the stayathomes are brain dead slaves, the fact is that the kids will remember the happy times and discard the rest — if you’re happy in your own choice of family. Our family spent a lot of time traveling “on the cheap” — although we kids didn’t know it was cheap at the time, we only knew that none of our friends came home from school on Friday night and heard “Pack the car, Mama, we’re going to Chicago!” or Vermont, or Iowa, or Pennsylvania, or wherever we were headed for the weekend. Our friends didn’t spend every Easter vacation with Granny in Alabama, or driving blue highways looking for the Big Apple (Virginia), the Statue of Vulcan (Birmingham), the See Rock City and Pedroville signs, or the unmistakable odor of Sweetwater Junction, Tennessee (home of a paper mill). They didn’t listen to Daddy’s stories about Baron Von Geiger’s Castle (which was in fact a hotel high on a mountainside) or Chief Falling Rocks who wandered the hills (hence the sign “Watch for Falling Rocks”) or the great NOSMO KING (No Smoking) who ruled the Kingdom of Allentown…and they didn’t get to stay in a tourist court run by Hopalong Cassidy’s mother. (Mrs. Cassidy who owned the tourist court fell right in with this story although of course she was no relation.)

Yes, we had a community closet of clothes that were owned jointly by all five of us girls; yes we ate what we were told to eat and said Thank You, enjoyed the Christmas Wish Books as any other book without any hope of getting anything in them, and got jobs as soon as we were old enough to have Working Papers (when the money we earned began to pay for our glasses, our clothes and shoes and our piano lessons — which were OURS) — but that was Life. And as the last of us turns 50 this year, we remember what a wonderful time we had growing up, and not the sound and fury, the lack of Goodies, and the hard work.

And we feel sorry for the kicking, screaming GrabbyBabies who will never know what it was like to have bedtime stories read by Daddy and not by a battery-operated teddy bear or a Video … and the day we saw Daddy in both Archie Bunker and in Peter Falk who read his grandson “The Princess Bride.”

Happy families are all different, but they’re all happy. If the snarky women sniping at each others’ choices of family structure would sit down and remember their own happy childhoods, they’d probably be happy too.

p>Thanks for that, sir. And Happy Passover. br> — Kate Shaw br> In Kanukistan br> (Toronto, Ontario) /p> p> TAX TO THE MAX br> Re: W. James Antle III’s