I took this picture just a few moments ago. It’s the view from the porch of a summer cottage that’s been in our family for more than a hundred years. Our cabin, named Ogontz by my forebears generations ago, looks over Lake Otsego, a nine-mile long lake in mid-state NY that ends (or starts, depending on your point of view) at Cooperstown, NY. Long before Cooperstown was known for the Baseball Hall of Fame (which I’ve gone to a dozen times, though almost always when taking visiting guests to the museum), it was home to the stories of James Fenimore Cooper, one of the earliest America novelists. The town was named for...

“You can do this yourself.” These were the five words I most disliked hearing from my parents. Oh, I know, you can probably think of five worse words to hear. But these words meant that something I had asked them to do for me got turned around into something I had to do for myself. And that, obviously, wasn’t what I wanted. If I had wanted to do it myself, I wouldn’t have asked them to do it in the first place! Like calling a coach to ask why I wasn’t playing as much as I thought I should be. Or settling an argument with a sibling. Or asking someone for a job. The very point of my asking is that these were things that...