Not as I Do: A Father's Report

In the late 1980s and early '90s, Lowe wrote a bimonthly column for Newsday called Fathering that played, naturally, against a female colleague's Mothering. In it, he outlined the various aspects of life as father. Not everything is about his four children-occasionally he reminisces about his feelings towards his own father. But most pieces focus on his two daughters, T.C. and Colleen (born in the late 1960s) or the two young sons, Jed and Dan, he had with his second wife-who was also his editor at Newsday. Faced with a regular column, Lowe understandably opted for what was most readily at hand, or underfoot-usually his son Dan, who was three when the column started and seven when it ended. It's too bad in a way, since the differences between raising his girls and his boys (not just in light of gender but also in view of the different mores of a different time) would have been interesting. Lowe opts for the usual topics: handling holidays, discipline, the suspiciously high fatality rate of his boys' pets, his responsibility to create moral children, but also his own creeping physical, cultural senescence (``I didn't know what Game Gear was, except that eventually it would render its predecessor, Game Boy, obsolete.'') Read as a whole, the book can be revealing, as it is in the change from Lowe's flippant tone when describing the death of an aged aunt to his clear pain when writing of the death of his week-old first grandchild. But Lowe's typically cheerful, often wise commentary is best dipped into time and again. (June)