Old women in Maine have an expression I've never heard anywhere else. They call the third son "your ticket to heaven." I've heard this from several of them in different parts of the state: "You have three sons? That third son is your ticket to heaven."

Two possible explanations for this expression come to mind. The first is acceleration, that the stresses of three sons will kill you sooner, and so get you to heaven earlier. I've noticed the increase in stresses as my sons came along, one after the other, every thirty months just like clockwork, and I've come up with a mathematical formula which I call the Squire's Law: the hassles with kids vary as the square of the number of kids. It's definitely not an arithmetic increase. Two are a lot more than one, and three are a WHOLE lot more than two. And four? Well, I'd rather not think about that.

And I won't be having four anyway, since I had my vases disconnected before my third son was born. I believe in zero population growth, and felt pretty sheepish about number three, as though people would think I didn't know what was causing it, or perhaps that I was a devout old-fashioned Catholic. Or I just couldn't keep it in my pants. That's closer to the truth. On one of Groucho's "You Bet Your Life" shows back in the Fifties, a contestant told Groucho that he had eight kids. "You have EIGHT kids!" Groucho exclaimed. "Well, Groucho, I love my wife," the contestant tried to explain. Groucho replied "I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally!"

A few years ago we took the boys down to Key West for their February holiday. We had a great time in that colorful little town. Every morning I'd get my wife's coffee at a shop operated by a cute little Cuban lady with a mouthful of shiny gold teeth. One morning I was kvetching about the kids, as I do too often, and she told me she had eight children. "Eight kids!" I exclaimed, "my God, what were you thinking?" "Theenkin'?" she chuckled. "I vas no THEENKIN'. Vas you theenkin'?" No, I guess I wasn't.

Another explanation for the ticket to heaven is a more Calvinist, and therefore more likely Maine, approach. And that is that by the time you've raised three sons you've earned your right to eternal bliss. Heaven, according to Calvin, is something we earn with hard work and suffering down here on Earth, and no Americans work harder or suffer more than Mainers, with our sparse economy, our rocky soil, our brutally cold, long winters, our black flies and mosquitoes, the polluted air that the prevailing westerlies blow in from New Jersey, New York and Boston, and our short but glorious summers teeming with tourists.

Don't get me wrong, I love my boys. They're great kids: smart, funny, talented, generous, loyal, fair-minded, well-formed and surprisingly handsome given my genetic contribution. They must take after their mom's side of the family. I married late in life; I was the classic case of the old bachelor who gets his head spun around by the younger woman. When we hooked up I was almost 40 and she was 24. That's almost a generation gap. She barely remembers the Sixties, and that's when I came of age. When you're 40 and have never been married, people think that you're either pathologically incapable of commitment, or you're gay. I admit that I did have some issues around commitment, and I'd always been attracted to bohemian women who weren't interested in marriage, but that begs the question: why was I attracted to them? It wasn't just tits and ass. Or was it?

I was looking to start a family. She was not. I really thought that I'd be missing out on something if I didn't have children, and when I first laid eyes on my wife I was unconsciously assessing her breeding potential. "Wow!" I thought. "I'd like to father HER children." We were married the old-fashioned way, as they say: when she was three months pregnant.

There's something to be said for having kids later, particularly for men. I don't think men are mature enough to have kids until we're at least 30. But I was almost 43 when our first boy was born, and I was already starting to tire easier, already starting to feel the effects of age, and boy, those sleepless nights with sick kids were hard. What could be worse than a screaming baby with a ear infection? By the time my youngest boy was born I was 48, at an age when most men are having grandchildren. I've always regretted that I balked when my wife wanted to adopt one of those little Chinese girls. I argued that our resources: attention, energy, money, were already spread pretty thin. But we'd have had a daughter, and my boys would have had a sister, and my wife would have had a companion amidst the fog of testosterone that clouds this old house.

I don't believe in heaven in the old-fashioned Christian sense. I see bad things happening to good people, and a lot of good things happening to bad people, and I think it's all pretty random. If there is a God, His eye ain't on the sparrow. I see God as the force of Nature, what Dylan Thomas called " the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." The notion of a judgemental bearded patriarch sitting above us is pretty silly, to me, and pretty damaging to life. Life is what's sacred, and whatever threatens that is unholy: wars, killing, pollution. I believe there is some sort of life after death; something happens to this consciousness after the body quits. I can feel my heart swell when I look at my boys in their peaceful moments, when they're not squabbling. My boys have raised my consciousness, made my soul larger at the same time that they've worn my body down. Maybe that's the ticket.