CHICKEN SMEDLEY.

My father once made soup. Barley soup. This was, give or take, forty-five years ago. The soup was red, so tomatoes must have been involved--also, I'm guessing, carrots, celery, onions, a turnip, maybe some soup bones, probably garlic, plus a few impulse grabs off the spice rack. He made it on a Sunday afternoon when I was sick and in bed and, unaccountably (blizzard? tornado?), he wasn't playing golf. I have no idea what my mother, the designated chicken-noodle-soup-to-sick-children bearer, was up to that day.

Nor do I remember anything about my father's soup's medicinal value (I got well, but who knows), only that it was the best I had ever tasted. My vivid sensory memory of that gustatory episode, I think, derives from this essential ingredient: surprise. As a matter of domestic policy, Dad's self-assigned task--insuring that ample provisions were in the larder--by no means extended to preparing a meal and putting it on the table. The pot of soup was more or less the equivalent of his hole in one (a marvellous never-to-be-repeated feat that I happened to witness) and, in its own way, it struck me as more novel and improbable than that golf shot. Had he pulled a porpoise out of a top hat, I would have been approximately as impressed. The entire gesture--making the soup, delivering it to me on a tray--made me feel peculiarly worthy.

If we're keeping Oedipal score, I suppose you could say that I've outdone my father, as for twenty or so years, mostly as a single parent, I've fed my children thoughtfully prepared, well-balanced meals, rotating a quality-controlled repertoire of fifteen or twenty tasty-especially-if-you-like-garlic main courses. A woman I know, a single mom who uses her oven as a bookcase, told me recently that, not counting when she nursed her son as an infant--he's now a teen-ager--she'd never served him a home-cooked meal. Which I interpreted to mean that I deserved credit for having spared my spawn the trauma and indignity of childhoods spent eating only takeout. But to what effect, exactly?

One day last January, when the eldest of my four sons, who is now out of the house and living in urban-single-guy digs, called with an asparagus question, I thought I handled it tactfully.

"Why would you be having asparagus when it's not in season?"

"When's the season?"

"Spring. I thought everyone knew that."