To Mom and Dad, who never forced me to go see Santa Claus.

When people come to my home for the first time, they often ask me, “Dave, where’s the bathroom?” To which I always answer, “Down the hall there, on the left.” And from that point on we are usually close friends.

I bring this up because people often wonder what I’m really like. “Dave,” they often ask, when they get out of the bathroom, “are you really as witty, insightful, articulate, and handsome as your writing suggests?” I would have to say that yes, I am, although I am not as tall as you might think. I’m maybe five nine. But then a lot of truly great writers were of average height or less. William Shakespeare was only fifteen inches tall!

Which leads us to accuracy. When Doubleday & Company decided, after days of heavy drinking, to publish this book, they hired a panel of extremely brilliant nuclear physicists, who combed through these essays and marked, with a red pencil, every sentence that might conceivably be accurate, and these sentences were all removed with pruning shears. So I freely admit, right up front, that there are no facts left in this book, and I don’t want you Little League coaches out there to send me a lot of cretin letters informing me that a ten-year-old can’t really throw a baseball six hundred miles an hour. Okay?

So there you have it, except for my philosophy of life. My mother used to say to me: “Son, it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.” I think that still makes a heck of a lot of sense, even in these troubled times.