This morning in Starbuck's I was sitting next to three friends who were having breakfast together. One guy was complaining about how hard his sister's visit with her daughter to New York was for him. Apparently, during one part of the visit, which involved dinner plans, his niece drank a whole glass of chocolate milk for before dinner and then didn't want anything to eat. This man, who was not old, maybe thirty five, was totally exasperated and was earning sympathetic noises from his two friends. He was explaining about how the sister offered her seven year-old child the opportunity to pick what she wanted to eat in the restaurant. "You don't ask a seven year-old what you want to eat, you just order for them. I mean, that's the way we were raised." He did make the admission that, he wasn't a parent, and maybe he didn't understand completely. But then he continued telling about another part of the visit where the mother failed to excercise enough authority when the child wanted to take the subway and the grown-ups wanted to take a cab, and gasp, there was a conflict. What a jerk, I thought. Too bad this girl has such a lame uncle. When I was a child, I remember thinking to myself, when I get older I will never do those things that adults do. Clearly, he never had that thought when he was little. Or he sold out somewhere along the way to being an adult. I wonder how old he was.