My mom has more than once said my father's never had a day of fun in his life. I hope my mother is wrong, but since she's lived with him for 50 years, I'm thinking she has a pretty good handle on this subject. I just hope that somewhere in the 35 years before they married, he had a couple good days of fun.

I hope he has scandalous secrets about which I don't know, things that still make him smile when he thinks no one's looking. My brother says he has some stories about nights out with buddies, but I suspect my dad was a spectator, and not a participant in most of the goings-on.

My father's 86 now, no less a curmudgeon than he was while my siblings and I grew up on the family farm, just an older one.

Instead of talking about farming, now he talks about bowel movements.

My dad was the only one home when I arrived at my parents' house earlier this summer for my mom's 80th birthday celebration. He hugged me. He hugged Robby. I asked him how he was, and he said he wasn't feeling so good.

"The god-damn doctor gave me pills that made me constipated," he said. "I took a laxative and but that just made me go a little, and nothing since. Damn straining irritated my hemorrhoids; they're all flared up. Christ."

He wrapped the whole sordid tale up saying, again, "I'm not feeling so damn good."

He told me all this with a straight face. All within 60 seconds of my walking in the door.

"Well," I said. "That doesn't sound fun."

I was home. And grateful only for the fact that he hadn't told me another story I'd heard: About what happened when the constipation ended. With volcanic effect.

A psychiatrist would have either a field day or a serious headache in attempting to label my father's disorder. From all that I've observed, he's agoraphobic, obsessive compulsive and bipolar.

It's certainly from dad's side of the family that my sisters and I inherited the mental illnesses from which we suffer. All three of us have struggled with depression and bipolar disorder. And you don't have to look very high into the branches of dad's family tree to connect the dots to past generations.

My mom's a good woman, but devoted to my father in a way I find hard to understand. She once told my sister she thought she would grow to love him over the years, but it never happened. She believes her reward for being a good wife to a difficult man will come in a life beyond this one. She is a staunch Catholic and after all these years, I understand why. She can't stop believing, or even question her faith. If she does, all these years of sacrifice will be for naught. To a woman who likes to laugh and has let pass countless opportunities for joy and fun to be by my dad's side, I truly cannot imagine how terrifying a thought that would be.

I respect her for her beliefs, and for how unshakable they are. I believe part of me is envious that she can be so certain when I am so unsure about not just the afterlife, but who or what this Higher Power is that brought us all here and how it plays into our everyday lives.

All that aside, you might guess that their unusual marriage spawned four unusual childhoods. But they were not without laughter.

Because Dad didn't have much fun in his life, he didn't leave much room for us to do so either. My siblings and I had to make do with what we had, and that was a challenge. My son is horrified when I tell him that we played with Jell-O boxes. They were cattle, who roamed the orange carpeted stairs in our farmhouse.

Lights were out at 10 p.m. Sharp. No talking, no going to the bathroom, no getting up, no lights on after that. No exceptions.

My sister and I, who shared a bed until we were well into Catholic elementary school, were regularly chided for giggling after the lights went out. Chided, I suppose, is not quite the right word. "Shut the hell up," my dad would yell down the hall, a phrase that sometimes only inspired us to more, but oh-so-carefully suppressed, laughter.

A light left glowing at 10:01 garnered a similar angry outburst. "Shut that god-damn light out!" Followed by the soft click of a light going off.

My Chicago cousins, who visited often during our growing-up years, tell me that one night - for what bizarre reason, I cannot imagine - Dad was out late. Past our bedtimes. They say we plotted this all out before bed, and when Dad came home, turning on lights downstairs while the rest of us lay in darkness, they waited for me to speak my line. I did, shouting down the stairs, "Shut off that god-damn light!"

Silence ensued - broken only by the sound of beds shaking as their occupants attempted to stifle laughter. Dad never said a word.

My mom was subject to these rules as well. During my childhood, she slept alone in a bedrooms downstairs, one level removed from Dad. It was a normal arrangement that no one questioned. Mom kept a coffee can under her bed. This wasn't a spittoon, though not even the saints in which she so firmly believes would have blamed her for taking up that or some other addiction to escape the strange world into which she'd married. No, the can was her bathroom during the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. night shift.

Mom knew well the creaky seventh stair. She did not even attempt to cross it.

Not so my friend Mary and I. Mary stayed overnight at my house only one time that I can recall. Though we're friends to this day, I think that experience was quite enough for her.

Mom let us sleep downstairs in her bed whenever friends stayed overnight. We settled in, whispering and laughing quietly after 10 p.m. This was a deliciously forbidden treat for me; being downstairs gave us an auditory advantage over my father. He couldn't hear our conversation, but he could hear plenty else. As the two of us wound down, Mary announced that she had to go to the bathroom.

"There's a can under the bed," I told her.

"What for?" she asked, eyes growing wide.

"To pee in," I said, a bit disgusted that I had even to explain this to her. Didn't everyone's mom pee in a can at night?

"I'm not peeing in that," she said. "I'm going to the bathroom."

Mary could not be dissuaded, despite my many warnings that the journey upstairs would be a perilous one.

"OK, then I'm going with you," I said, and we tiptoed together out of my mother's bedroom. Both of us instinctively assumed the crawl position, creeping step by step up, not just suppressing our laughter, but holding our breath. We were five steps from the top when a stair creaked. Both of us froze, dead silent. For a moment, we thought the sound had gone unnoticed.

Mary raised a hand to move to the next step. "Get back downstairs and get the hell to bed!" my father's voice boomed.

We retreated, wordlessly, back down the stairs, walking upright this time.

I closed Mom's bedroom door and shook my head in defeat. "Sorry, Mary, it's can time."

Mary shook her head. "I just won't pee," she said. "Let's go to sleep."

Twenty minutes later, she shook my shoulder. "OK, I've really gotta go. Will you go with me again?"

"Mary! Don't be stupid. He's just laying there waiting for us. Just pee in the can!"

"Fine," she said, "then I'll go by myself."

But this I couldn't allow. It was dangerous territory, and I knew it best. If we were to go down in defeat again, we'd do it together.

This time, we agreed to skip the seventh stair. It seemed an ingenious plan. Both of us lifted our hands from the sixth to the eighth. No sound. I grinned at Mary in the dark. Then both our knees hit the seventh stair.

This time, the voice came quickly, and like a thunderclap. "God-damnit, I said get the hell to bed, you god-damn kids!"

That night, Mary peed in a can, for the first - and last - time. After that, all the overnights were at her house, where we stayed up late, sat outside and scared ourselves silly with the certainty that we'd seen UFOs. We shut off all the lights in her bedroom and sang and danced to the Jackson 5's "Dancing Machine." Mary would prove to me she was meant to be with Leif Garrett because her lips matched perfectly with his when she pressed them to the full-length poster on her bedroom wall. We read aloud the definition of "sex" from the S encyclopedia. We made snickerdoodles at midnight. In short, we did what girls do.

And we peed whenever we wanted. Mary's parents didn't care.

When I think back on that night and others like it, I realize the effort my dad made to shout at us - whether it was Mary, my brother, my sisters or I - surely exceeded the disruption he'd suffered if only we'd been allowed to go unchecked.

But this was part of his lifelong curmudgeonly behavior.

Then again, maybe this was Dad's way of having fun. Maybe he had all of us fooled and on those nights, in the darkness of his room, he lay smiling. Maybe, minute by minute, this was the way my dad got in those couple days of fun in his life.