How much does a life weigh? Is it the product of our positive or worthwhile acts, divided by the bad? Or is it only the human body itself, put on a scale—a two-hundred-pound life?

I hold a gun to my son’s head. He weighs about one hundred and thirty pounds, the gun no more than two. Another way of thinking about it: My son Lincoln’s life weighs only so much as this pistol in my hand. Or the bullet that will kill him? And after the shot will there be no weight?

He is smiling. I am terrified. I’ll pull the trigger and he will die, yet he’s smiling as if this fatal metal against his head is the finger of a loved one.

Who am I? How can I do this to my own son? Listen—

Mileage meant cloud ears. If it had been a good day, full of long fares and chatty customers, my father often treated me to a meal at Lee’s, the Chinese restaurant across the street from our house. Two dollars for the works, including a dish of cloud ear mushrooms on rice. Mom and Dad hated the place and would never go because everything there tasted “like grease pudding.” But he was nice enough to trade me the two bucks for a hug and a kiss. I got the best of both deals because I loved hugging my father. Both of my parents were great hug givers, as opposed to many parents who accept them as either their due or a necessary evil of living with children.

I was lucky. My father taught me generosity, how to live with a calm person when you are not, and ventriloquism. He delighted in the art of throwing his voice, of putting words in someone else’s mouth.

My mother was just like her maiden name, Ida Dax. Short, up front, no nonsense. To her dismay, my father nicknamed her “Daisy” on one of their first dates and refused to call her anything else. He said both she and her name reminded him of Daisy Duck. You can imagine what he had to do to win her offended, practical young heart after that. But he did, because in spite of her seriousness, she loved to laugh and Stanley Fischer liked nothing more than to make her laugh. Unfortunately, my father was also a man destined to be a mediocre-to-rotten businessman. By the time I became fully aware of him, he had bombed at a large number of jobs, so both he and my mother were satisfied that he’d become the town’s only (and thereby “successful”) taxi owner. Mama, although shorter-tempered and less forgiving than Dad, was luckily not one who cared very much about wealth or material things. As long as bills were paid, there was sufficient food and clothing for the family, and a little was left over for each of our “vices” (my eating Chinese food, their buying a television set or going to movies every weekend), then life was okay. I cannot remember her ever badgering him for ending up where he did. In retrospect I don’t think she was proud of him, but she loved him and considered herself wise for having chosen a man she liked talking to, one who smiled with genuine delight on seeing her every night when he came home.

My childhood memories are rather vague, but that’s probably because I was safe and content much of the time. I remember sitting in Lee’s Restaurant and looking out the window at our house. I remember playing catch with a Wiffle ball with Dad. When the white ball floated through the air toward me, he made it talk. “Outta my Way! Here comes the Wiffler!”

My father always had time to play, my mother bought only the best colored pencils and paper when she understood how important drawing was to me. They loved me and wanted me to be whole. What more can we ask from another human being?

When my brother Saul was born, I was already twelve years old and more on my parents’ side of the fence than his. As a result, he grew up with two parents and an intermediary, rather than a full-fledged brother who gave him noogies or made his life happily miserable. By the time I went to college, Saul was only six and beginning elementary school. It was not until a decade later when he was a teenager and I was working in New York that we developed any kind of relationship.

A writer friend recently published an autobiographical novel that was badly reviewed. She told me, “I’m not angry because it flopped: I’m angry because I used up my childhood on that book.”

The idea is amusing, but I find it hard to believe anyone could “use up” their childhood on anything, no matter how old we get. Like some kind of personal Mount Olympus, our youth is where the only gods we ever created live. It is where our imagination and belief were strongest, where we were innocent before turning gullible, then cynical. Whether we remember in detail or only small bits, it is inexhaustible.

Luckily for my father, we lived in a town full of hills. Commuters getting off the train in the evening would take a look at the two-hundred-step staircase up to the town center and plod tiredly over to Dad’s black four-door Ford. He knew many of the people by name and, leaning over the top of the car, would greet these rumpled men with a thump on the roof and a “Come on, Frank. Last thing you need now is to climb those stairs.”

I often rode with him and was assigned the job of jumping out when we’d arrived and opening the back door for the customer. Sometimes they’d tip me a dime or a quarter, but more than the tip, I enjoyed being there to hear what was said during the ride to their homes. These were successful people, owners of big houses with river views, two cars, sometimes even a tennis court or a swimming pool. I knew their kids from school, but generally they were a snobby, aloof bunch. In contrast, their parents, because they were either tired and in the mood for comfortable small talk or just plain adrift in their well-appointed lives, talked to my father about many surprising things. He was a good listener and at times unusually perceptive. All the way across these years I think, by their remembered silences and nodding heads, that he might have helped some of them with what he said.

Once while home on vacation from college, I was with him when he took a woman named Sally O’Hara from the station. She had a notorious husband who slept with just about any woman in town with a pulse. Unfortunately, Mrs. O’Hara was one of those people who would tell anyone within hearing distance about their problems. That day was no different, but she also said something that stuck in my mind and later shaped my success.

“Stanley, I’ve decided what I need most in life is a detective of the soul.”

My father, who was used to backseat philosophers, knew how to play the straight man.

“Tell me about it, Sally. Maybe I’ll get Max here to go into the business.”

“It’s simple. All you’ve got to do is track down the people who know the big answers, Max. Find the man who can tell us why we’re here. There’s gotta be someone out there who can. Or the person who can tell me why my husband would rather spend the evening with Barbara Bertrand than me.”

I was already doing cartoons for the college newspaper, often using a geometric form I’d created named “Paper Clip” to make zingy comments and complaints about life on campus. They were mildly successful and funny, and the editors allowed me to draw whatever I wanted. But when I returned from that vacation, I gradually began to turn “Paper Clip” into a whole new world.