My uncle Milton wasn’t exactly a hardened criminal, but the truth is he was once caught breaking and entering. Most of the time Milt was a mild-mannered, slightly absent-minded professor of chemistry at Smith College and lived with my aunt Roseanne in Northampton, Massachusetts in a wonderful Revolutionary-era house at the end of Popular Hill Road. Once there had been a sign on their road that read DEAD END, but my aunt Rosie was a published author and the chair of the Northampton...