As a younger man, in his mid-thirties, working for the Chicago Sun-Times, my father won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on racial segregation in Chicago real estate. He used to say that journalism was a young man's game, which was why he got out of it in his early forties to take the University of Chicago job. Whenever anyone ever mentioned his Pulitzer, my father would almost invariably answer, "Pulitzer Prizes go to two kinds of people: those who don't need them and those who don't deserve them." No one, at least in my presence, ever asked him into which category he fell.

My mother idolised him. She was a good soul, my mother, but, as became evident to my sister and me before we reached the age of ten, a bit of a ditz. She wasn't much of a cook, often burning things or forgetting to include essential ingredients in complex dishes she probably shouldn't have attempted in the first place. She was wildly disorganised and forgetful, so that often, when we expected her to pick us up after piano lessons or little-league games, she would show up an hour or more late.

She also laboured under the misapprehension that she was an amusing raconteur. She could take a full 15 minutes to tell one of her supposedly riotous stories–about, say, the large toothbrush attached to the key to the ladies' room that her dentist gave to his patients, or the confusions of a bookseller on Michigan Avenue who gave her a hard time–whose punchline never failed to fizzle. Ellie and I were both embarrassed for her when she set off on one of these stories before company. But our father, usually so tough on bores and boors alike, at least when recounting their behavior to us at our dinner table, showed infinite tolerance for our mother's lengthy and ill-told stories.

I cannot say that I loved my father. I suppose I never really connected with him. There was something a bit distant about him, something a little cold; it was as if he had something very important on his mind that my sister and I weren't worthy of being let in on.

Someone once said that the reason master bedrooms in American homes and apartments do not have locks on their doors is so that children can enter their parents' bedroom, catch them making love, and later in life have something to tell their psychiatrists. I never caught my parents in the act of lovemaking, nor can I easily imagine it now. My father was always kind, even courtly, to my mother. I cannot recall them ever arguing in any serious way, at least in front of Ellie and me. But I don't have many memories of them kissing or embracing, either. The element of intimacy, or at least physical intimacy, between them didn't seem to be there. Still, credit where credit is due, my father stood by my mother through the four-year torture of her Parkinson's disease, nights and weekends performing all the functions of a practical nurse, and doing so in the most affectionately solicitous way, right up until her death.

Not one of those full-court-press dads, my father never attended my little-league games, never took me to sports events or concerts or spent much time alone with me generally. Somehow I didn't mind. Strange though it may seem to say, I didn't miss his attention. I worried mainly about his disapproval. I didn't fear my father, exactly, but I did worry about being the target of his contempt, which I knew, from hearing him talk about faculty at the university, could be withering.