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I don't mean to suggest, in describing the Barry homestead, that I grew up in some kind of underprivileged, hardship childhood environment. Not at all. Not even close. Spiders aside, I had a wonderful childhood. We didn't have a lot of material things, but we had a LOT of fun. And we had freedom. Behind our house were several large tracts of undeveloped land, which we called the Woods. That land has long since been subdivided into manicured McMansion estates, but back then it was one big sprawling nature preserve, many unoccupied acres of trees and meadows and brooks and ponds.

The landowners didn't mind if we local kids ventured onto their property,3 and venture we did. We spent countless happy hours roaming the Woods, exploring, climbing trees, swinging on vines, damming creeks, swimming in and skating on lakes and ponds, catching deeply unfortunate frogs, shouting, burping, farting and of course throwing rocks, many rocks.

When we weren't in the Woods, we were riding our bikes all over Armonk, pedaling for miles, looking for adventures to have and other kids to play with and/or annoy. We played red rover, hide and seek, capture the flag, running bases and various mutant forms of baseball involving as many as fourteen and as few as two players per team. We sometimes got into fights. We shot many, many things, including each other, with BB guns. When we got a little older we hitchhiked to Mount Kisco or White Plains to go to the movies. We experimented with cigarettes4 and engaged in what I will euphemistically describe as "mischief."

Needless to say we did most of these things without parental supervision. You've heard this ad nauseam from us Boomers, but it's true: Parents back then often had no idea where their kids were or what they were doing. The prevailing parental philosophy was that if the kids got home by suppertime without major injuries, all was well. It wasn't that our parents didn't care about us; I think it was mainly that they didn't view the world as a fundamentally dangerous place. They grew up in the Depression and had recently been through a world war. To them, the 1950s weren't so scary.

Also parents back then were pretty busy. At least mine were. My dad, when he wasn't building our house, was commuting to New York City to do his real job, which was being executive director of the New York City Mission Society, a nonprofit organization that ran programs for inner-city kids. He was active in New York's antipoverty community and the civil rights movement. He often worked late and on weekends, going to meetings and community events, sometimes giving guest sermons in churches in Harlem, the Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant.

My dad was born in Minneapolis, Kansas, where his dad was a pastor. When Dad was two, his father was assigned to a church in Cleveland, where Dad grew up. He went to Oberlin College and then to Chicago Theological Seminary. In Chicago he met my mom; they got married and moved to New York City, where Dad had gotten a job at the Presbyterian Board of National Missions. Seeking room to raise a family, they moved to Armonk—in those days, Armonk land was cheap—and bravely embarked on their do-it-yourself house project.

My dad was not a good carpenter, but he was a very good man. He was wise and kind and caring, and he devoted his life to making other people's lives better. People just naturally saw the goodness in my dad; they loved him, trusted him, confided in him, counted on him.

He wasn't a pastor, so he didn't have a congregation, but he was a person people turned to when they had trouble. Many times our phone would ring,6 and it would be someone in tears, someone sick, someone with family problems, someone whose child was in trouble, someone talking suicide.

"Is Dave there?" they'd say.

Dad would get on the line and sit there in the living room, smoking his Kent cigarettes, listening—he was a great listener—for however long it took, talking quietly, calmly, always calmly, offering what comfort he could, never judging. If they needed Dad to be there, he'd put on his hat and coat and head out, day or night. He was always there for people who needed him.

Dad was a devout Christian, but he didn't judge others by their beliefs. Over the years he officiated at many weddings, and quite a few were for people who didn't consider themselves religious or whose churches didn't permit them to marry each other. He'd marry Jews to Catholics, Baptists to atheists. If two people loved each other, he'd marry them.

I'm making my father sound saintly, but he wasn't the least bit holier-than-thou. He was down-to-earth, never pompous or pretentious or smug. People felt comfortable around him. He didn't wear a clerical collar. He loved parties, loved to drink and dance and sing, loved to write song parodies. He loved humor of almost any kind. He was a fan of the great humorist Robert Benchley and owned several books of Benchley's collected columns. When I was somewhere around eleven or twelve I read those books and became obsessed with them; they definitely influenced my writing style, and I still read them today.

Dad was self-deprecatingly funny. He had a running joke involving the fact that he didn't have a PhD degree because he took a job and never got around to finishing his thesis. He'd be doing some menial household task, and he'd announce: "If only I had finished my PhD thesis! Instead here I am, cleaning this toilet."

He loved to laugh, my dad. Which is one reason he married my mom.

Over the years the question I've been asked by interviewers more than any other is "Where did you get your sense of humor?" I always answer: my mom.