Cheaper by the Dozen

well stop and eat, while I get my bearings. You pick out a good place for a picnic."
    While we were eating, Dad would keep looking around for something that might be interesting. He was a natural teacher, and believed in utilizing every minute. Eating, he said, was "unavoidable delay." So were dressing, face-washing, and hair-combing. "Unavoidable delay" was not to be wasted.
    If Dad found an ant hill, he'd tell us about certain colonies of ants that kept slaves and herds of cows. Then we'd take turns lying on our stomachs, watching the ants go back and forth picking up crumbs from sandwiches.
    "See, they all work and they don't waste anything," Dad would say, and you could tell that the ant was one of his favorite creatures. "Look at the teamwork, as four of them try to move that piece of meat. That's motion study for you."
    Or he'd point out a stone wall and say it was a perfect example of engineering. He'd explain about how the glaciers passed over the earth many years ago, and left the stone when they melted.
    If a factory was nearby, he'd explain how you used a plumb line to get the chimney straight and why the windows had been placed a certain way to let in the maximum light. If the factory whistle blew, he'd take out his stopwatch and time the difference between when the steam appeared and when we heard the sound.
    "Now take out your notebooks and pencils and I'll show you how to figure the speed of sound," he'd say.
    He insisted that we make a habit of using our eyes and ears every single minute.
    "Look there," he'd say. "What do you see? Yes, I know, it's a tree. But look at it. Study it. What do you see?"
    But it was Mother who spun the stories that made the things we studied really unforgettable. If Dad saw motion study and team-work in an ant hill, Mother saw a highly complex civilization governed, perhaps, by a fat old queen who had a thousand black slaves bring her breakfast in bed mornings. If Dad stopped to explain the construction of a bridge, she would find the workman in his blue jeans, eating his lunch high on the top of the span. It was she who made us feel the breathless height of the structure and the relative puniness of the humans who had built it. Or if Dad pointed out a tree that had been bent and gnarled, it was Mother who made us sense how the wind, eating against the tree in the endless passing of time, had made its own relentless mark.
    We'd sit there memorizing every word, and Dad would look at Mother as if he was sure he had married the most wonderful person in the world.
    Before we left our picnic site, Dad would insist that all of the sandwich wrappings and other trash be carefully gathered, stowed in the lunch box, and brought home for disposal.
    "If there's anything I can't stand, it's a sloppy camper," he'd say. "We don't want to leave a single scrap of paper on this man's property. We're going to leave things just like we found them, only even more so. We don't want to overlook so much as an apple peel."
    Apple peels were a particularly sore subject. Most of us liked our apples without skins, and Dad thought this was wasteful. When he ate an apple, he consumed skin, core and seeds, which he alleged were the most healthful and most delectable portions of the fruit. Instead of starting at the side and eating his way around the equator, Dad started at the North Pole, and ate down through the core to the South.
    He didn't actually forbid us to peal our apples or waste the cores, but he kept referring to the matter so as to let us know that he had noticed what we were doing.
    Sometimes, in order to make sure that we left no rubbish behind, he'd have us form a line, like a company front in the army, and march across the picnic ground. Each of us was expected to pick up any trash in the territory that he covered.
    The result was that we often came home with the leavings of countless previous picnickers.
    "I don't see how you children can possibly clutter up a place the way you do," Dad would grin as he stuffed old papers, bottles, and rusty tin cans into the picnic box.
    "That's not our mess, Daddy. You know that just as well as we do. What would we be doing with empty whiskey bottles and a last year's copy of the Hartford Courant?"
    ""That's what I'd like to know," he'd say, while sniffing the bottles.
    Neither Dad nor Mother thought filling station toilets were sanitary. They never elaborated about just what diseases the toilets contained, but they made it plain that the ailments