Spare me the details.

Everyone knows the penguin story--the one about the child who thought he would like to know more about penguins. He approached the librarian, who helpfully presented the boy with a book she knew he would enjoy. But after spending some time with it, the boy returned the book with the complaint: "It told me more about penguins than I wanted to know."

I find myself often in the position of that librarian: anxious to offer more than is asked for; to present a veritable feast to someone who wants no more than a snack; to enhance a story, to embellish a recipe. It is not easy for me to confine myself to the prescribed ingredients right there on the index card pinned to the kitchen curtain above my work space. If the recipe concludes with "add one-half teaspoon of oregano," why not cut up some fresh basil, throw in a few sprigs of cilantro? Wouldn't this zucchini and a few cherry tomatoes add interest to the mixture? Someone familiar with the recipe may ask, "What's in this, Kate?"

I am not, I hope, like the neighbor who, when asked, "How are you?" answers the question explicitly, discursively, and at length, assuming that you really want to know. But sometimes I wonder.

Long ago, when our first male child achieved the age appropriate for this now-dated rite of passage, I was called upon to listen to his faltering recital of altar-boy Latin. A couple of his sisters, of course, hung around the edges of this project, each one confident that if the unlikely opportunity should present itself, she could do a better job.

Predictably, I attacked the problem with more enthusiasm than the candidate. Deus, I wanted him to know, is in the nominative case. In ad deum you have the accusative, the object of a preposition, while dei, in the next line, is the genitive form. It means "of God."

"Please, Mom," he begged, "don't tell me all that stuff. I just have to learn it. I don't have to know what it means. He says we have to know the first three pages by Friday." I knew who "he" was, and thereafter confined myself to the text. But it wasn't easy to confine my urge to tell my son about that lovely word omnipotens, and to point out that the only Greek surviving in the Latin liturgy was Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison.

Thirty-five years later, one of this child's children, a ten-year-old girl, called me with questions I have been hearing from grandchildren all over the country. A national genealogical urge has hit the middle schools: the pursuit of one's roots; finding the names and nationalities of remote ancestors. So far I have heard the same request from Highland Park and Park Ridge locally, and from as far away as Dallas and Nashville. Now it was young Margaret Katharine who needed to fill in some blanks on her family tree. She wanted to know the name and nationality of my father, one of her great-grandparents.

And I really warmed to the task, you might say. "His obituary," I told her, "called him James N. Mann, but that was not his real name, which had, at my mother's insistence (she had a great number of ancestors buried in the Baltimore cemetery, and none of them had a Greek name), undergone a series of reductions. At first she cut his name to Manousos, then to Manos, and finally to the irreducible Mann. But his real name, Margaret, was Demetrius Nicholas Manousopoulos. He was born in a little village near Sparta, called Chrysefa. Do you want me to spell any of that?"

There was a long pause. Finally, "Kate," she said patiently, "I have only a very small space to fill in on this branch of the family tree I have to make. I will just have to call him, `Great-grandfather M., Greek.'"

Katharine Byrne writes from Chicago.