Every parent loves his or her child; it's the prime directive of the species. Twenty years ago, when my wife was pregnant with our first baby, Hillary Clinton told me that having a child is like taking your heart out of your body and letting it walk around.
For some parents,
however, their beloved child takes their heart on a long, wild ride that
careers from joyous and generous to dark and dangerous. So it was with
John Schwartz and Jeanne Mixon. Joseph, their third child, was a
precocious reader, a super-sensitive old soul, fiercely defiant when he
believed the teacher was too autocratic, hyper-quick on the trigger. Or,
as his father put it, a squirrelly kid.