My father, brother, and son are named Crozet (pronounced: cro ZAY). Crozet was the maiden name of my father’s paternal grandmother. There’s a town in Virginia named Crozet, a town in France, and an island chain in the Indian Ocean south of Madagascar. The town in Virginia is named after one of our ancestors, Claudius Crozet, who built railroads, taught at West Point, and (to our family’s everlasting shame) invented the blackboard.

A croze (derived from the French word for cross) is the notch at the top and bottom of a wine barrel stave, and the tool used for making it. A crozet is, presumably, a small such notch or tool. (Claudius’ father was a wholesale wine merchant.) I recently discovered that crozet is also a kind of pasta.

Note to movie fans: A wine barrel, even empty, is extraordinarily heavy. (I know. I make my own wine and have two barrels on a shelf in my garage. Getting them up there by myself was no mean feat.) Arnold Schwarzenegger might be able to lift one over his head, but no normal man could; and even Arnie could not lift a full one. Bear that in mind the next time you watch a Zorro movie and see actors tossing them at each other like beach balls.

It’s tough sometimes to be a dad,
Especially when your kid is bad.
You wonder why she did what she did
– And why she’s not a wonder kid.

A wonder kid is always good, ETC.
(“The Wonder Kid,” F.R. Duplantier, 1992)

Maria, my first "Wonder Kid"

I wrote “The Wonder Kid” for our eldest daughter, Maria, when she was four or five, and dedicated it to her when it was first published. I don’t believe that I was ever an overbearing disciplinarian, or even very strict, but I wanted her to be a good kid, and grow up to be a good adult. That silly thing that parents say — “This is going to hurt me more than it will you” — was really true for me. I felt I had to chastise her when she’d done something wrong, but I always regretted having to do it, and felt bad about it afterwards, though never bad enough to abdicate my responsibility as her father. The transgressions were minor, mind you, as I ascribe to the “broken windows” approach to crime control. Years later, when she took to dying her hair odd colors, I’d get strange looks from other parents; occasionally, one would ask, with apparent sympathy: “Doesn’t that bother you?” As a matter of fact, it didn’t, and I said so. Then I asked the killer question: “If my teenaged daughter’s odd-colored hair is the biggest problem I have to deal with as a father, I’m doing pretty good, don’t you think?”

The poem concludes with an epiphany: the realization that my daughter already was a “wonder kid.” And so she was. Today, at the age of 21, Maria is now a wonderful adult — as is daughter #2, Ida, 18.

“The Wonder Kid” has been republished many times, in print and online. Over the years, I’ve added the names of the rest of our kids, one by one, to the dedication. By the grace of God, dumb luck, and maybe some decent parenting on the part of their father and mother, all of our children have been “wonder kids” and promise to be wonderful adults. It won’t be long, either: Isabel is now 16, Maxine 13, Crozet 11, and Audrey 8.