New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.

I also created problems.

Although I tried to act so I would always give Lil a `rational' explanation for my eccentricities, I let the dice increasingly determine what kind of a father and husband I would be, especially during the three weeks Lil, Larry, Evie and I (for three-day weekends) spent in our rented farmhouse on eastern Long Island.

Now historically, my friends, I had been a withdrawn, somewhat absentee father. My contacts with my two children had consisted primarily of: (a) yelling at them to stop yelling when I was on the telephone in the living room; (b) yelling at them to go play someplace else when I wanted to make love to Lil during the day; (c) yelling at them to obey their Mommy when they were most blatantly disobeying their Mommy; (d) yelling at Larry for being stupid when trying to do math homework.

There were times when I would not yell at them, it is true. Whenever I was daydreaming about something (`Rhinehart Discovers Missing Link in Freudian Theory!' 'Sophia Loren to Divorce Ponti for NY Psychiatrist,' `Incredible Stock Market Coup by M.D. Amateur'), or thinking about something (how to discover missing link, win Miss Loren, make a coup) I would talk calmly to the children about whatever it was they felt like talking about (`That's a beautiful painting, Larry, especially the chimney.' Lil `That's a ballistic missile.'), and even, upon occasion, play with them. (`Bam bam, I got you Daddy.' I collapse to the floor. `Oh, Daddy, you're only wounded.')

I liked my kids but primarily as potential Jungs, Adlers and Anna Freuds to my Sigmund. I was much too wrapped up in being a great psychiatrist to compete in the game of being a father. My paternal behavior manifested flaws.

Among the alternatives which I gave the dice to consider were some which expressed the fond father buried deep within, and others which gave full rein to the not so benevolent despot: On the one hand the dice twice determined that I pay extra attention to my children, that I spend a minimum of five hours a day with them for each of three days. (Such devotional! Such sacrifice) Mothers of the world, what would you give to spend only five hours a day with your children?)

In September one day, after breakfast in the big old kitchen with white cupboards and built-in sunshine in the big old farmhouse on the big plot surrounded by big trees and bright, flowing fields of poison ivy, I asked the children what they wanted to do that day.

Larry eyed me from his seat by the toaster. He had short red pants, white (in places) T-shirt, bare feet, built-in scratches and scabs on both chubby legs and bleached yellow hair hiding most of his suspicious frown.

'Play,' he answered.

'Play what?'

'I already took out the garbage yesterday.'

'I'd like to play with you today. What do you plan to do?'

From her seat Evie looked at Larry wondering what they were going to do.

'You want to play with us?'

'Yes.'

'You won't hog the dump truck?'

'No. I'll let you be the complete boss.'

'You will?'

'Yep.'

'Hooray, let's go play in the sand.'

The sand was actually the farmer's plowed field, which rectangled the farmhouse on three and a half sides. There,

winding in an intricate maze among the green explosions of cabbage, was a road system to put Robert Moses to

shame. For an hour I traveled in a 1963 pickup truck (Tonka, 00 h.p., .002 c.c. engine, needed new paint job) over

these roads. There was frequent criticism that I wrecked too many secondary roads while maneuvering my bulk down

tertiary roads, and that tunnels that had been standing for years through cyclones and hurricanes (three and a half days

through one brief shower) had collapsed under the weight of my one errant elbow. Otherwise the children enjoyed my

presence, and I enjoyed the earth and them. Children are really quite nice once you get to know them.

They're more than nice.

'Daddy,' Larry said to me later that day when we were lying in the sand watching the surf of the Atlantic come rolling

on to Westhampton Beach, 'why does the ocean make waves?'

I considered my knowledge of oceans, tides and such, and decided on `Wind.'

`But sometimes the wind doesn't blow, but the ocean always makes waves.'

`It's the god of the sea breathing.'

This time he considered.

`Breathing what?' he asked.

'Breathing water. In and out, in and out.'

'Where?'

'In the middle of the ocean.'

'How big is he?'

'One mile tall and as fat and muscley as Daddy.'

'Don't ships bump his head?'

'Sometimes. Then he makes hurricanes. That's what's called an "angry sea".'

'Daddy, why don't you play with us more?'

It was like dropping a heavy sea anchor into my stomach. The phrase 'I'm too busy' came into my mind and I flushed

with shame. 'I'd like to but-' entered and the flush got deeper.

'I don't know,' I said and huffed down to the surf and bulldozed my way in. By floating on my back just beyond the breakers all I could see was the sky, rising and falling.

Both the dice and my own desires permitted me to be with the children more in August and September. The dice once dictated that I take them to a Coney Island Amusement Park for a day, and I look back on that afternoon as one of the two or three absolute islands of joy in my life.

I brought toys home to them spontaneously a couple of times and their gratitude at this unexplained, unprecedented gift of the god was almost enough to make me give up psychiatry and the dice and devote myself to fulltime fatherhood. The third time I tried it, Larry's crane wouldn't work and the children fought solidly for three days over the other one. I considered vacationing in Alaska, the Sahara, the Amazon, anywhere, but alone.

The dice made me a very unreliable disciplinarian. They willed that in the first two weeks in September I should never yell, scold or punish the children for anything. Never had the house been so quiet and peaceful for so long. In the last week of September (school had begun) the dice ordered that I be an absolute dictator regarding homework, table manners, noise, neatness and respect. Fifteen hard spanks were to be administered for all transgressions. By the sixth day of my trying to enforce my standards Lil, the maid and the children locked themselves in the playroom and refused to let me enter. When Lil chastised me for my sudden week-long spasm of tyranny I explained that I'd been overwhelmed by a speech by Spiro Agnew on the evils of permissiveness.

Events like these strained, to say the least, my relations with Lil. One does not live seven years with a person an intelligent, sensitive person who (periodically) shows you great affection - without forming certain emotional ties. You do not father two handsome children by her without strengthening that bond.

Lil and I had met and mated when we were both twenty-five. We formed a deep, irrational, obviously neurotic need for one another: love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness. We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry. We soon discovered that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being married which being single can't cure. Or so, for a while, it seemed to us.