Not too long after the Second World War, I was a student in a day school in the Hudson Valley, a virtual paradise on an estate of about fifty acres overlooking the river at a point that many of its painters have memorialized in some of the best paintings America has ever seen. There I was, in this verdant place, not even ten years old, learning my lessons, returning each night to my family. From May through September we would sit outside every evening on a brick terrace under an enormous magnolia and have tea until darkness closed in. What a wealth of hours I spent with my father, talking about every subject known to man, and how easily I spent it, considering what I know now and what I would do, if I could, to bypass the laws of nature just to have a minute with him.

On the playing fields of this school we learned nearly every team sport in existence, courtesy of a short ex-Marine whom we called Coach, a good man, perhaps not too bright, but a superb athlete who never understood that when we addressed him we had secretly in mind something with four wheels and a highly shellacked door that closed with a deep click. Perhaps because he had been a Marine (we could without fear of retribution say to his face, “You are marine”), he had an exquisite array of creative punishments. Most of these involved agonizing calisthenics or wearing underwear