And sooner than later they do find out what's bothering him; I forget what it is, but whatever it was, it happens a lot more simply than most real psychiatry. In fact, like a lot of things in Hollywood, the movie grossly oversimplifies psychiatry; but, hey, it's only a movie, right?

I was thinking about this because I was thinking back into my own childhood the other night and wondering what effect it had on my life. Probably a lot, but from my present perspective, on the rapid downhill side of existence, it's sometimes hard to see exactly what.

And it probably doesn't matter much, anyway. Whatever it was, I managed to make it into adulthood, fatherhood, grandfatherhood and now great-grandfatherhood apparently stable and mentally healthy.

(I know some might challenge this, but they've got their own problems.)

Still now and then, especially at night when I am trying to go to sleep, I find myself "thinking back," back into my childhood.

I think I do this because I think my childhood wasn't like everyone else's.

(Well, all right, I know everyone's childhood is unique, but I still think mine is a little unusual.)

When I was 4, my father died suddenly of pneumonia (because antibiotics had not yet been invented), a traumatic experience for my sister, my mother and me. After his death, we moved into my maternal grandparents' house. We lived there for 10 years.

My grandparents were both old and ill, and one of the reasons we moved in with them was so my mother could help take care of them. The other was we really didn't have anywhere else to go. In those days single parents were more often widows or widowers than divorced.

Women, especially with small children, had trouble fending for themselves. So my mother took the common path. She went back home. It could not have been welcome news to my grandparents, so it was gracious, even loving, of my grandparents to take us in.

And it wasn't. But let me explain.

My grandparents lived in what seemed then a very large house, two stories high, with five bedrooms (but only a single bathtub and toilet, both upstairs).

In later years when I revisited the house I came to realize it wasn't all that big. It only seemed that way.

And it was gloomy. Part of this was my father's death, which wandered like an unwelcome ghost through the place. It made me feel different than other kids. There was only one other boy in school that I knew who had no father.

Part of it was the house itself. The ceilings were 11 feet high, it had few electric lights, there was no central heating, only fireplaces, and most rooms averaged a window apiece. The furniture was Victorian--stiff, formal and forbidding. There were strange pictures on the walls: a stag baying over its fallen mate in the snow, a sailor home from the sea with his family, a very large wreath in a shadow box made of snips of hair from family members.

To a child it seemed and was a haunted castle. Its ambiance was heightened by the fact that not long after we arrived my grandmother fell ill and could no longer climb the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor. She took up permanent residence in the back parlor downstairs, a fact that severely curtailed our movements. We tiptoed past her door.

Not long afterward my grandfather suffered a stroke from which he never recovered and was put to bed in the front parlor. This made the first floor of the house pretty much a hospital.

I don't want to exaggerate this. Outside we were free. We had a large city block with an alley cutting it in two through which we wandered at will. We climbed over fences, crept through barns and garages, played a game called "Beckon," a more complicated version of "Hide and Seek," and did almost anything we wanted to the outbuildings in back.

We must have been a trial to our grandparents.

But it wasn't your average home.

As she got older my grandmother got more severe in judgment and decorum. We weren't allowed to play cards (it led to gambling, she thought). I got my mouth washed out with soap once for using a bad word. Death always lurked somewhere in the house and finally overwhelmed it.

About the time I started high school, in a single winter both grandparents died and we moved, finally, into our own home--a small two-bedroom bungalow.

That's what I think of when I think back into my childhood. I don't know how much different than yours this may be.

I do think it's different than Gregory Peck's in Spellbound, though.