It’s a family legend. My two sisters and I were on a car trip with our mom and dad. I think we ranged in age from 6 to 10. We were driving home from an outing. It was 4 p.m. and Dad asked us, “Who wants to have an ice cream?” Of course the three of us squealed with delight as our dad drove to the parking lot of the Friendly’s Ice Cream Shoppe. Instead of stopping, he drove right by. When we cried in disbelief he told us, “You’d better get used to it—life isn’t always fair.” We were shocked and dumbfounded. It was years later that we learned our mother had leaned over to our dad and quietly told him we would not eat our dinner if we had an ice cream at 4 o’clock, vetoing his decision. So Dad drove on by and ad-libbed his wisdom. Later in life, we used our dad’s quote over and over when things did not turn out our way. It was a sage piece of advice, albeit a hard one to digest at the time. Around the same time, I was visiting my grandmother, my dad’s mom, in Plymouth, Mass. I...