For most of those years when the kids were little, we lived in a small two-family house on East 57th Street in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn that we bought after the boys were born. I remember we paid $28,000 for it, which seemed like a fortune at the time. 

Nor did we have the house all to ourselves; we lived upstairs and rented out the more desirable ground-floor unit. Upstairs, there were just two bedrooms so the boys shared one and Susan slept in the tiny den next to the master bedroom. There was an office in the basement that we reached by an outdoor staircase.