I used to be a full-disclosure father. I delighted my tiny sons with stories about shooting friends with BB rifles. I trotted out my nastiest and most obscene jokes. We laughed and laughed.

Then I heard that one of the boys had been repeating the jokes at school. He might easily have been suspended. "What if they don't find the BB gun stories amusing either?" I thought. "What if they find them instructive instead?"

Since then I've inhabited that anxious purgatory of half-truths and omissions where most of today's responsible parents with "youthful indiscretions" seem to dwell. Information is released in my house on a need-to-know basis. I don't want my boys to drink. If they do drink, I don't want them to be alone with their remorse.

When my 14-year-old drank Scotch at a sleepover, he told me about it. So maybe this method is working. Besides it's only fair that I should know when my children are drinking. I certainly knew when my parents were drinking. Does "always" ring any bells?

What strikes me most forcefully about the Dubya bombshell is that it is a bombshell at all. It's extraordinary how far we've come, or gone, depending upon your point of view. And how quickly we've forgotten.

"Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing," my father wrote in the introduction to "The Stories of John Cheever," "who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like the 'Cleveland Chicken.'" And boy did they get stoned.

Nothing secret about it either. I was very little when I was taught how to lay my fingers along the side of a crystal glass so that if my father needed four fingers of Bellows Club Bourbon, I knew how to get it. Flattered to be asked, thank you. Nobody had thought up the word "enabler" yet.

I remember one festive evening when a close family friend -- a full partner at Morgan Stanley, if memory serves -- fell down the stairs to the dining room. It wasn't the fall that made the evening remarkable, but rather the fact that the banker's highly polished shoes left scuff marks up above the handrail. Scuff marks, which could be seen and admired the following morning.

My parents lived in a house with a drive that was lined with stone. My mother still lives there, although on more temperate terms. I remember standing out in the drive in the evening and watching as the dinner guests backed up until they hit the stone wall, crushed the lenses of their brake lights and then drove off, the tinkle of broken glass playing against the roar of exhaust.

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