Larry Miller, contributing humorist
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ONE OF MY OLDEST and best friends from college days (daze?) is a guy named Pete Hamilton, and we're still close. Our families are, too. We visit them, they visit us, gifts go back and forth, I'm Godfather to one of them, you get the picture.
He has four daughters, each one prettier than the next, and this is near-perfect proof that God has a terrific sense of humor. In college, Hamilton was one of those handsome, charming guys who made females dilate just by entering a room, and he mowed a swath through the surrounding women's schools that would make crop-circles look like a ribbon on a box of cufflinks. Years later, after his fourth girl was born, we were talking on the phone, and he said, "I don't know what it is with all these girls."
And I said, "Oh, I know what it is. It's karma. Every woman you drove a truck over in school got together and held hands around a pentagram and put the quadruple whammy on you, but good."
He kind of knew it then, but he sure knows it now. The oldest just finished her first year at Vanderbilt, and the youngest is four, so he's looking at roughly eight thousand more nights of his doorbell being rung by an endless parade of up-to-no-good young swains just as devious as he was. Can you imagine those conversations? "Oh, hi, Mr. Hamilton, I'm here to--"
"--Excuse me, but I think I know exactly what you're here to do. I
believe we both very clearly know the reason you're here. So please don't insult either of us by pretending it's something else. Yeah, yeah, let me guess, you sit behind her in Social Studies, and you really dig her take on the Peace of Westphalia. Come in and have a seat, while I put some salt peter in your Coke."
Of course, this has ever been so. My mom, who had three brothers, used to love to tell a story about one of them up in his room making out with a local girl. She ran downstairs to the kitchen and breathlessly said, "Mom, Harry's got a girl in his room!" As she used to tell it, my grandmother didn't even look up from the stove, but just said, "Let her mother worry about it."
I've also learned important lessons from Hamilton over the years, though not necessarily the ones he thought he was teaching. Back in the late '80s, he and his family were living in London, and I went to visit. This was long before I was married, or even dating anyone for more than fifty hours, so I could just pop on a plane and do what I wanted; and I did. They were living in one of those great row houses in Kensington, with the living room and den on the main floor, the bedrooms and library on the upstairs floors, and the kitchen and dining room and service entrance downstairs.
I had been bopping around the city buying trifles and tokens and popped into his office around four, and just as we sat down the phone rang. It was his wife, Marsha, and she had forgotten about some parking tickets, and the car got "booted," and it had to be picked up downtown, and she was very upset. He told her not to worry, he'd go get it with me, and everything was all right.
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