I knew I was a bad boy by the time I was two because I remember my mother telling me about the “terrible twos.” It’s a time, she explained, when children begin misbehaving and cause trouble and when they do, they are being bad.

When you are a child and your parent tells you that you are bad, you have no reason not to believe them.

Actually, the “terrible twos” stage is a necessary and normal part of childhood development. Noted psychologist Erik Erikson said it’s a time when toddlers are actively discovering and exploring their independence and asserting their own will.

Being independent was not a headline experience in my memory, being in “hot water” was. It was an above-the-fold headline on a nearly daily basis.

It took time for me to realize something. When you are born with an instinct for humor and mischief, not meanness or cruelty, you’re likely to find yourself in “hot water” at times.

Firing off a verbal quip here and there. Making comic sounds of some kind (snorts made people laugh). These were sounds that made you laugh (Because you know they’re funny!) if only the world around you would admit it. Hiding behind a living room couch when no one is looking and then leaping out with a war hoop of some kind, startling the bejesus out of my parents and resulted in my having to stand silently in the corner, facing the wall, for 10 minutes.

There is one story about me in our family when my humor saved me from punishment. We were visiting my grandparents. I was three or four, so were talking sometime in 1956, 1957. Poppop, my grandfather, smoked Briar wood pipes in those days and I loved playing with them.

I’d sit in his big leather wingback chairs playing with one or more of his Briar pipes, often early in the morning which is exactly what time it was when parents and grandparents came into the living room after a meal and caught me sitting in Poppop’s chair, covered in the black specks of tobacco. As soon as I saw them all, I said, “Damn ants,” and began brushes them off me which led them to collapse in laughter and me to escape punishment.