When I was growing up, especially when I was a teenager, mornings in my house were, well, unpleasant. My mother was always slow to get up, I think now because she was so unhappy with her life. She was never ready to leave until the last minute, or rather, the last minute for her to get to work on time. Angers both spoken and unspoken swirled through the house, nobody had a proper breakfast, and by the time we left I would feel scattered and hopeless. After we dropped my mother off  there would be the silent, tension-filled twenty minutes or so in the car alone with my father until we got to my school. Many times I was late, and served numerous detentions that I never told my parents about because somehow I knew it would come around to being my fault anyway.

When Lynn was born I promised myself that no matter what I had to do, our mornings would be wonderful, and by and large they have been. And I guess it's ironic that this unpleasant episode which I'm about to relate, which really is an anomaly, should occur not in the days when all three of us had to be out the door by 7:00 am sharp, but now, when I have nothing but time.

It was just Lynn and me this morning. It was cloudy but calm, and Ron had left for an early morning session at the nearby flying club field where he operates his radio-controlled airplanes. Last night Lynn came home with the news that she was unable to open the trunk of her car. Just two days ago the lock had worked fine, a good thing since she needed to get her jumper cables. 

That's one of the adventures of the first months of having a used car -- you don't know what kind of subtle warning signals the previous owner might have been given, or what he might have known about what was nearing breakdown time. In the beginning the car dripped some fluids. We had all the seals inspected and some replaced, although the drips have come back. Two days ago it was the battery, easy enough to jump start and then replace when our friendly neighborhood garage mechanic determined it would no longer hold a charge.

This morning I tried the trunk lock, with disappointing results. Not only would it not open, the key broke off in my hand (the top part where the hole is for attaching to a key ring). I was able to draw it out of the lock, but I told Lynn that she'd have to use the other key. I said that it was probably a minor problem and that we'd have it looked at when the car went in for inspection in June.

"Well," she said, "I certainly don't want to wait until June to have it fixed." (She forgets, of course, that June is only four weeks away, and that she's not planning any trips where she'll need to haul cargo.)

Something about her tone irritated me, and I spoke sharply to her. The truth is, I was covering my anxiety about the car, part of a diffuse, generalized anxiety about all things Lynn that I've been feeling since she got the car, and the job. The other night she shrugged and said she didn't care because she'd be gone in two years when I asked her what kind of wallpaper she'd like for the bathroom redo I'm planning.

After the exchange about the trunk, she poured out some cereal. I was reading the paper. I heard her open the refrigerator, and then say, "Well, I guess I won't be having cereal." Yesterday afternoon she'd mentioned that we were out of milk, but I hadn't gone out to the store, figuring that milk was not an urgent need, like, say, toilet paper or deodorant. There are other things we can eat for breakfast.

I interpreted her remark about the milk as an accusation. And I spoke sharply to her again. I know enough magazine psychology to know that my rejoinder was born more of anger with myself for not being a good mother who always has the larder stocked than it was at Lynn for saying anything. But I hurt her, and she went upstairs.

Before she left I apologized, but I didn't feel any better. She said "okay" but it was with a set jaw and tears in her eyes. She'd spent so much time upstairs combing her hair and avoiding me that she didn't have any breakfast. So my Wonderful Wunski, the best little girl in the whole world, the love of my life, went to school with an empty stomach and an aching heart.

And I'm sitting here remembering a day when I was just about Lynn's age. Mornings had become increasingly chaotic, and I was late to school more often than not. I think I might have complained about it at home, and was probably told that if I didn't like the way things were I could make my own arrangements for getting to school.

And so I did. Each Catholic parish provided transportation for its own students. That's how I got home in the afternoons. I told the bus driver I wanted to be picked up in the morning from now on. The stop was a ten-minute walk from our house, through a park and an underpass to the other side of the highway. The bus came at 7:30.

When my father saw me getting ready to leave at just after seven he asked where I was going (a question I thought he should already know the answer to). When I told him, he got angry again (my father was always angry with me, it seems) and said I had to go with him, as usual. I got angry back, said I'd made the arrangements he'd ordered me to, and left.

In chemistry class that afternoon (the same chemistry class where I would soon learn of the death of John F. Kennedy) I sat with my head bowed over the book, a pencil in my hand. But I wasn't paying attention and I wasn't taking notes. I was thinking about the angers and the ugly words and how unhappy I was because I couldn't make things right at home. And I started to cry.

And I wonder what Lynn is doing right now. It's just after 11:00 in the morning. She's been to chemistry class already. She works so hard on that and her last tests have been disappointing. She's having trouble with her social studies class too, because, among other things, the teacher uses only one method of testing (true-false and multiple choice), the method Lynn is weakest in. I've worried that I'm not helping her enough, that I haven't paid enough attention to the difficulties she might be having.

I'm worried that I have made her day more difficult than it needed to be. And I'm sitting here, as I did in 1963, tears welling up and spilling over.

And it occurs to me, for the first time in almost forty years, to wonder if my father felt bad that day too.