God willing, here is part of the pitch for -- and what may be the opening line of -- my next book:

When I was a child, nearly every kid had a father at home. Some were drunkards, some were abusers, some were gamblers and hoodlums, some were cheaters, but they all shared a roof with their children and, good or bad, they had a presence that made some kind of positive difference in their kids’ lives, if only to hold them accountable and mete out discipline.

Granted, my childhood began in the 1950s and morphed into the teenage years in the 1960s when, as we now know from Phil Donahue, Oprah, Jenny Jones and Sally Jesse Raphael, was not exactly the era of domestic bliss, despite the myths perpetuated by the TV families on “Father Knows Best,” “The Donna Reed Show” and “Ozzie and Harriet.”

Those, after all, were the years that supplied the talk show fodder of incest, alcoholism, spousal abuse and philandering which, theretofore, had been hush-hush, so the touted “intact nuclear family” was sometimes nuclear in a different sense.

Still, the presence of so many family men in the community had, overall, a salient effect. I know that on my block, with its passel of kids, we all felt safer knowing there was a daddy in just about every house, and, after his own household, he had an unspoken duty to defend us too.

Who can say now whether these men liked one another? They had different professions, different salary ranges, different habits and hobbies, so maybe they were not necessarily the most neighborly neighbors.

But they were always civil to one another and seemed to share a sense of responsibility or, in the very least, the appearance of being responsible. We kids had heard, for example, that Mr. So-and-So had a girlfriend on the side and liked to tip a whiskey bottle everyday, stumbling in loud and late. If that were the truth, he at least had the decency to leave the scandal to whispers and not parade that truth in our young, impressionable faces. 

I suppose you could call it honor among men. That was something worth having and guarding in those days. Even when tainted with hypocrisy, the men tried to keep it.

Somewhere along the line, fathers started disappearing. Instead of a quick, impromptu wedding in their mama’s living room with the guy standing by looking a little ashamed, young females barely into womanhood or just on the brink of it, would get pregnant and stumble into motherhood without a partner. They settled for the father of their child being a decent provider, paying for diapers and milk and showing up to play with the baby.

By the time my own children were in their late teens and early 20s, not only were unwed mothers commonplace, but there was a trend developing whereby the fathers were not only absent from the home, absent from the trips to the pediatrician, absent from the grocery store checkout line, but absent altogether. Many a young woman has bounced a toddler who had her lover’s eyes, his mouth and his smile, but who would never ever know him.

The reasons for this are manifold, nuanced and complex. Bill Cosby and others can lay the blame on our own community and its attitudes, but that doesn’t do justice to the matter. External forces -- cultural changes, public policy, biology itself -- created an atmosphere that made it easier for a man, or boy, to lose his honor as a father and simply drop his seed and walk away, perhaps unaware of the treason he has committed to our heritage.

All we can do about it is figure out what those forces are, do our level best to combat them and, in the meantime, defy them in a determined war against the ravages of hyper-incarceration, unemployment, miseducation and the ludicrous pretense of being “hard.”

I’ve got a working title for my prospective book, which I announced to a group of bibliophiles in Harlem a couple of weeks ago.

“I want to call it ‘Men, Come Home,’” I told them.

“Quickly!” someone shouted from the rafters.