Spoiled Children

When my kids were little, I often had the strangest of experiences, at least for someone who was raised as I was, in a place small enough that every adult felt entitled to laying down the law (sometimes resulting in their getting a correction from my mother, because what I was doing was approved of in the family, if not in the village) so that if you stepped a foot out of the true path, you were likely to find yourself at the vortex of a converging tornado of grandmothers.

Sometimes, most...