Quality Time

I'M upstairs getting our 5-year-old ready for bed. She's screaming. Our 1-year-old is whacking my guitar with a plastic hammer. From the bedroom doorway I hear my older son's voice straining to rise above the racket."

Was Reggie Lewis' Choice Unusual?It is always a shock when a good young family man dies abruptly. However, Reggie Lewis selectively ignored advice and a consequence died doing what he compulsively enjoyed. In a perverse and prolonged way, aren't millions of smokers and drinkers doing the same thing every day?Quentin D. DavisAberdeenChild AbuseAccording to an article in The Sun (Aug. 9) about a child custody case in which the names were not revealed, Harford County Circuit Court Judge Cypert Whitfill, "who had convicted a father of child sexual abuse and placed him on probation, agreed to allow the man unsupervised overnight visits with the child."

So this little girl in nursery school turns to the teacher and cries, "Mrs. Webster! Nathan is eating the endangered animal cookies!"Welcome to the world of "Quality Time," a daily cartoon panel that begins today in The Sun.Penned by Gail Machlis, a San Francisco writer and artist, the panel explores "the world of young professionals, their conflicts and ambitions," according to the Chronicle Features syndicate.But Ms. Machlis says it often explores her own experiences, too."Most of the cartoons are not my personal life, exactly," she says.

Is anyone else tired of hearing about quality time with their children?My child is 27, and I'm not fussy about quality. I just enjoy time -- any kind of time -- with her.For years we talked about a mother-daughter getaway. But either she was studying for exams or I couldn't leave work. The whole idea was put on hold while we planned her wedding. Three years later, when she announced that she was going to be a mother, we realized it was now or never.We had several requirements for our getaway.

When we think of January, a lot of us think of post-holiday let-down, early winter blahs and influenza. But if we're working mothers, we're likely to have a different slant on this much-maligned month."

Boston. -- My aunt and I are making stuffing and convening with our ancestors. It's a ritual we have performed each year since I inherited Thanksgiving from her. Or to be precise, since the family dinner moved one doorway and one generation down the street.In truth, my aunt, who is eight inches shorter and 21 years older, still regards me as something of an apprentice in the Thanksgiving business, not entirely ready to strike out on my own. A bit too inexperienced to be entrusted with the awesome responsibilities of tradition.

Generally speaking, most people I know wish they had more of the following three things: money, time and hair. The order of priority, naturally, varies with each person.I have decided my first choice -- after a brief flirtation with the category of hair -- would be: time. Not that I couldn't use more money or more hair. But somehow both these commodities seem attainable. And both seem to have infinite possibilities. Especially the hair thing.Time, on the other hand, is finite. And non-specific, too, since most of us really haven't a clue as to how much of the thing we call time has been allotted to us.Of course, the point has been made -- by philosopher Albert Camus, no less -- that to have money is to have time.

It seems I have a bunch of notes, quotes and leftover "Q's without A's" in my notebook and on 24-Hour Sportsline tapes to unload on you today.* For you coaches out there, isn't one of the main problems with parents whose kids don't play all the time the so-called quality time they spend with their kids?It seems more and more veteran coaches, whether it be high school or recreation, are pointing to how the coach/parent relationship has changed. These days, parents seem to complain about playing time more than ever before.

The sixth edition of "Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care" offers parents plenty of long-standing advice and some that is new for the '90s. Haere are some of the new entries in Dr. Spock's venerable book:*Quality time: "The idea of quality time in itself is fine. But I'm concerned that a few conscientious, hard-working parents take it as an obligation - whenever they're at home of for a certain number of hours daily - to be talking, playing, reading with their children, long afteer patience and enjoyment have run out."

I REALLY GET sick of that buzz phrase "quality time.'' And I don't think it is fair to the people who are trying hard to make connections with their offspring. It denotes typecasting of parents and their jobs.Let me explain. Quality time has been described as time spent with your child when you are too rushed with your career to give the child more time, a kind of catch-up game plan.I observed a Q-timer the other day -- a career mother who gets home at 5 and takes her child from school to my neighborhood park every afternoon at the same time.