Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery, committed to excellent service and friendly smiles.

Your food is our passion.

The writer Susan Domino has told us this week, she's been reporting her book, The Family Dynamic,

since she was in fourth grade.

So when I was a kid, my parents used to go away on these long business trips,

but often they also just went on vacation just the two of them so they could have some time

together, and they would leave us with family friends.

The house was located just a few blocks from our own, but its rights and rhythms were distinct

from ours. In our house, members of our family could reliably be found after dinner, enjoying

80s-era sitcoms in a small den. I don't remember what our family friends' three sons did during those hours before bed,

but I know the television, located in a room off the kitchen, went untouched.

They would sit around the dinner table, and at a certain point in the meal,

the father would turn to one of his three sons and say,

So Daniel, a plane is leaving New York flying 8,000 miles an hour, and he would have one plane leaving another,

that meeting another that was meeting at a different, there were these very elaborate verbal

math problems that the kids were expected to work out in their head over

the dinner table. A ritual of mathematical sport I enjoyed to no end until the evening when

the father posed such a question to me. After an interminable silence, my mind entirely blank,

I burst into tears.

It was for me an eye-opening experience because I realized that in some families, the parents

were doing this very concerted thing of trying to enrich their kids, kind of wherever they could, including at

the dinner table. And I absolutely compared that to my own home, where, you know, we mostly

...