We still call the refrigerator at our house “the icebox,” which confuses the grandchildren. On the door of the icebox we have many things, some very old. We have a magnetic promo for a state senate candidate who was elected, served, and termed out. There’s the driver’s license which one of our daughters got in high school, retrieved from behind the dryer 20 years later. And there’s a collection of fully yellowed bits clipped from papers, including a picture of a youthful, elegant Rosa Parks walking up the stairs of the Montgomery courthouse (not as published at the time—we’re not that old!) A Jon Carroll column tells how the premature death of a friend inspired him to give up his onerous day job and start doing work he enjoyed (I hope he kept a copy in case he needs to think about that now.) And there’s Ellen Goodman’s brilliant Thanksgiving column from November of 1993, containing this telling observation: “For most of the year, it is quite enough to fail to live up to Hillary Clinton. At holidays, we get a second chance to fail to live up to Martha Stewart.” (Writers can add a third chance: to fail to live up to Ellen Goodman.) In her column 10 years ago she summed up the challenge facing contemporary women around the holidays: to do almost everything their mothers did, almost everything their fathers did, and to do it in double-time with a big smile and a well-toned physique. We’ve added another wrinkle since 1993: do it all while maintaining constant communication with everyone who counts by cell phone and e-mail.
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