For me, it was a real shock — a move to a starkly different world. I’d spent my earliest years on the prairies of West Texas, where the cities and towns were young, settled by the “old” local families only a few decades before. Unlike the vistas of gnarled mesquite trees and tumbleweeds I’d grown up with, Charlottesville was gorgeous. It was close to the Blue Ridge Mountains, with towering trees and rolling hills.

But more than anything, the town was steeped in its long history and devotion to tradition. It had been named after a British queen (who was married to the infamous George III) and founded in 1762. The country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, had established the University of Virginia (UVA) there and his elegant home Monticello graced a nearby mountaintop.

Jefferson died at Monticello on July 4, 1826, the 50^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which he had authored. (In one of those haunting quirks of history, his presidential predecessor John Adams died that same day.)

Even 151 years later, though, if you lived in Charlottesville, it was a little hard to believe Thomas Jefferson was really dead. At UVA, he was always referred to as “Mr. Jefferson” in hushed and reverent tones — as if, it was often said, he were still in the next room.

“What would Mr. Jefferson have wanted?” was a question people in Charlottesville asked a little too often and way too seriously, in my opinion. But I usually kept most of my sacrilegious ideas to myself out of pure cowardice. Mr. Jefferson wasn’t to be talked about light-heartedly, especially by a Texan.

One early party my husband and I went to, we got to meet the closest facsimile of Mr. Jefferson available anywhere — his 5^th great-grandson, Rob Coles. Rob, who was red-haired, lean, and 6’2, greatly resembled his forebear. During the 1976 Bicentennial, he had teamed up with a Lafayette descendant for a number of celebrations to portray their famous ancestors.

By the time we met Rob, around 1978 or so, he seemed a little dazed and puzzled the Bicentennial had come and gone so quickly. Every time I saw him at parties, he was usually jumping up to get women drinks.

I asked him once what he had been doing recently. “Not much,” he said, shrugging. “You know, time just passes so quickly.”

He shook his head. He was such a sweet guy, a little wistful about what he could now do in the world.

“Hey,” he said, “can I get you a drink?”

*****

 The first time we visited Monticello in 1977, our guide never mentioned Mr. Jefferson had owned hundreds of enslaved people. She also made no reference to where these people might have lived on that beautiful mountaintop.

Explanations weren’t offered or expected then. It was a different time.

In those years, Thomas Jefferson’s reputation was still at an uncomplicated zenith — Renaissance man, scholar, inventor, one of his nation’s founding fathers, author of the Declaration of Independence. As John F. Kennedy commented at a White House dinner honoring Nobel laureates in 1962, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

But the narrative about Jefferson was gradually changing. Fawn Brodie’s book, “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography,” had been published in 1974, corroborating generations of Black oral history that he had fathered several children with Sally Hemings, a woman he owned and his dead wife’s half-sister. One of their enslaved sons, it was reported, looked so much like Jefferson that conversations stopped when visitors to Monticello first saw him.

Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s eminent biographer and a UVA faculty member, didn’t take those allegations well. His denunciations of Brodie’s book and its scurrilous rumors thundered in the Charlottesville media and beyond. Mr. Jefferson, Malone said, was far too honorable and noble a man to have committed such heinous offenses. He failed to mention that Brodie’s research into Jefferson’s travels reliably placed him at Monticello during the time each of Sally Hemings’ pregnancies had begun.

But life went on in Charlottesville and Mr. Jefferson continued to be spoken of reverently. He was still presumably in the next room.

*****

In 1998, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which oversees Monticello, authorized a DNA study that indicated Jefferson had likely fathered all six of Sally Hemings’ children. Mr. Jefferson hadn’t been in the next room, evidently. He’d been in the room where it happened.

Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’ relationship left history with puzzling questions that will never be resolved completely. His words and deeds were prolific and well-documented; in contrast, we know almost nothing of her, who she was, what she wanted.

She was enslaved and owned by him. Was their sexual relationship rape? Could she have loved him — or is that an idiotic question that will never be answered? Did he love her? Why did he never freed her?

And how do we judge a person like Thomas Jefferson who lived so long ago, in another time and place? Do great human beings have to be flawless? This judging of other human beings is a pretty shabby and slipshod business — but being human ourselves, we have a robust legacy of the shabby and slipshod.

Last week, my husband and I went to see “Sally and Tom,” a play within a play about Jefferson and Hemings and the acting troupe who perform their story. Suzan-Lori Parks, an eminent, Pulitzer-winning playwright, wrote the work, which was presented at Austin’s Zach Theater. The play was remarkable and innovative in so many ways, but overly long and crowded with too many characters and dilemmas. Like others I’ve talked to, I’d love to see it again when it’s been re-worked.

My husband and I left Charlottesville 43 years ago, but its stories still intrigue me. The Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone died in 1986, too early to have viewed the DNA results he would have scorned. Jefferson’s 5th great grandson, Rob Coles, died in 2013. I see he had a 35-year career as a one-man Jefferson re-enactor, so he must have found his way after the Bicentennial.

In the meantime, DNA appears to have answered the question of the paternity of Sally Hemings’ six children to the satisfaction of most historians. So science seems to have solved this long-ago mystery.

But what about questions of rape or coercion or affection? Or pure blindness to the humanity of a woman who was chattel? Those secrets of the human heart and mind lie safe and untouched, buried with their keepers.

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My husband and I were there for a friend’s birthday festivities. One day, we had lunch at a seafood buffet.

I noticed two guys nearby, probably in their 30s, were watching us closely. Weird. I figured I had spinach in my teeth. That happens all the time, even when I’m not even eating spinach.

After we finished lunch and got up to leave, the two guys hailed us. Turns out, they were both considering popping the question to their longtime girlfriends.

“You inspired us!” one of them said. “You were having such a good time, talking and laughing. How do you do it?”

They asked how long we’d been married and what our secret was. They were younger than our own kids, so guileless and fresh-faced. I started to feel maternal. They really thought we had the answer to their questions!

As usual, my husband’s and my minds both went blank, searching for something pithy yet profound to say about marriage. But what? We hemmed and hawed and then wished them well.

Here we are on our 47th anniversary in Oaxaca in 2019. The tree behind us was called the marriage tree. Notice how spiky it is? It’s a cactus.

*****

More recently, a young woman came and sat down across from my husband and me when we were riding the L in Chicago. Like the Vegas guys, she also wanted to know our secret. (Which makes me think the bar is pretty low when people are shopping for long-term relationship advice: If you’re old and still speaking to each other in a civil manner, you’re evidently an expert on marital bliss.)

I thought about telling her about the time my husband and I had flown into O’Hare Airport a few years ago. He was busily pecking away at his phone, trying to find us an Uber, even though there was a long line of taxis ready to go. I kept telling him about the taxis and he kept ignoring me, intent on his phone and finding a cheaper ride.

By the time we finally settled into an Uber — many long minutes later, I might add — I wasn’t speaking to him, that insensitive jerk. Eventually, he texted me, asking why I was silent.

“I’m not speaking to you,” I wrote. “You’re an asshole. You totally ignored me.”

I lit into him for several more miles, detailing his many personal flaws. He defended himself, I argued back, he eventually apologized for his boorish Uber behavior, I answered grudgingly. More and more texts flew between us and the ice eventually began to thaw.

By the time we got to our hotel, we were laughing.

So — maybe that should have been one of my answers to the questions we get: Just keep inventing fresh, new ways to argue with each other! Don’t get stuck in a rut! Get creative!

*****

Oh, hell. The older I get, the longer my husband and I have been together, the more I realize how mysterious and complicated a long relationship is — and how little I understand of it. For us, it’s been wonderful, it’s been fun and adventurous; it’s also been stormy and furious and painful at times. Like having children, it’s been the best thing we’ve ever done and the hardest.

Sometimes I visualize our marriage as an old ship, weatherbeaten and battered, patched and repaired, but miraculously still seaworthy. I know where that ship almost ran aground, where the patches lie and what they cover, where it could still use some work here and there. It’s not a new ship and it isn’t that picturesque but — at least to my eyes — it has a certain jauntiness to it, a tattered magnificence. Maybe survival has a beauty of its own.

I’m not sure I want to waste people’s time talking about old ships, though.

Maybe I should advise people to marry someone who makes them laugh. That, and to just hope they’re lucky when they roll the dice. After all, that’s what I learned that weekend in Vegas.

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The verse then goes on to list how a virtuous woman works with wool and flax and plants vineyards and girds her loins and clutches the distaff and “eateth not the bread of idleness.”

Eatething the bread of idleness.

(Also, if you haven’t used the good, old-fashioned term “girds her loins” in a text or chat recently, the internet says it refers to “a person who is not lazy but wakes up ready to work hard and handle daily duties.” In other words, it’s even worse than it sounds.)

Anyway, I always get massively depressed when the old price-of-rubies quote gets hauled out and dusted off. Next thing you know, the organ is cranking out some dirge and the whole family, including in-laws, is wracked with sobs about what an unappreciated doormat Old Mom was and how they’re all going to be forced to do their own laundry now.

(“Come back, Mom! We don’t know how to start the washing machine!”)

That just wouldn’t work with my family and their blistering sense of humor. They’d all pitch over in hysterics cackling about the very idea of my working with flax and wool and girding my loins and clutching a distaff. “She couldn’t even heat a dish in the microwave without setting the house on fire!” one of them would probably scream.

Hysterical laughter — instead of wailing, weeping, and mourning that should go on for days. How deeply inappropriate! Forget the whole book of Proverbs at my service!

In fact, right now, I’m off to eateth some more bread of idleness. Maybe the whole damned loaf, if I feel like it. After all, I’ve always loved carbohydrates.

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I like to think I’m pretty cool and with-it about my own death. “I

don’t want to be a vegetable,” I tell my family. “I don’t want to be on

a ventilator. If I’m that bad, just pull the plug.”

After a few of those vehement declarations, my husband and two

grown children began to tell me yes, they knew what I wanted and

frankly, I was becoming kind of a bore on the whole topic, so why

didn’t I just drop it?

All of which explains why I was mortified by my reaction when our

daughter, 43, approached me with an idea. Since she and her 39-

year-old brother would both be in town for the Christmas holidays,

she said, they should sit down with my husband and me to talk

about end-of-life plans with us.

End-of-life? Really? Good grief. I panicked.

Wasn’t this a little sudden? Pushy, even? After all, my husband and I

are only 75 and 76, respectively, and we’re both in good health and

have most of our marbles and we exercise and he won his age group

in a recent 10K race and I lift weights even though it’s boring as hell

and we eat well, kind of. Also, we updated our wills 10 or 15 years

ago and I’m just about positive we know where to find them.

Time passed, the holidays came, and I calmed down. The four of us

gathered for our scheduled dinner a few days after Christmas. The

four of us! How long had it been since only the four of us had been

together? It had been several years.

Our son, his wife, and their two children live in Chicago, more than

500 miles from our home in Austin. I remember when he took me

out to dinner in 2014 to tell me he’d decided to move there. I kept

searching his face, watching him closely, struck by his maturity and

how carefully he’d thought about this decision. That dinner was one

of those defining moments of parenting an adult child for me — a

time when I was simultaneously so proud of him for taking this step

and so bereft I wanted to screech, “But what about me? And what

about your father? You’re leaving us?”

(To be fair, the move hadn’t been totally mapped out. He left in

November, for God’s sake, and arrived in wintry Chicago without a

job or a place to live. But it seemed to work out. Within a couple of

weeks he had a job and two housemates, both of whom were named

Jennifer. And now, 11 years later, he has a career in marketing, a

great wife and two kids, and Chicago is home.)

Our daughter, her husband, and two children moved from Seattle to

Austin in 2021 when the pandemic was waning and we were all

trying to recall what normality felt like. She and her husband

brought their jobs with them and bought a house a couple of miles

from our downtown condo.

Their move here was like a great gift to my husband and me, offering

us the chance to be more involved in all their lives and to know our

two oldest grandchildren better. My daughter and I, who’d had a

tumultuous relationship over the years, have settled into a newly

close friendship. In all, their move changed our lives for the better —

and how often does that happen when you’re in your 70s?

****

But anyway, back to our end-of-life dinner. The evening the four of

us gathered, our daughter brought Indian food we all ate quickly.

“Well, we might as well get down to business,” one of us said. I don’t

remember who said that but it wasn’t me. We sat in our small dining

room that also serves as my office, passing documents back and

forth.

My husband and I’d drawn up a list and location of our assets.

We also had our wills, our powers of attorney and medical powers of

attorney, our advance directives. Sure, the wills were a bit long in

the tooth, but we promised to update them. Also, we would write

our own obituaries soon. (A great relief to our kids since I’m a loud

critic of boring, cliche-ridden obits.)

Our daughter and son asked us questions. What kind of memorial

service — and where? Secular, maybe at a nearby downtown club.

Music? We both love Floyd Cramer’s version of “Last Date” and

“Feelin’ Good Again” by Robert Earl Keen. I wanted “Amazing Grace”

even though I’m agnostic, and my husband mentioned “Toccata and

Fugue in D Minor,” played full-blast. We both worshipped

Willie and the Beatles, too.

Who could attend the services? Oh, anyone, even Republicans.

Speakers? Our children, our son-in-law, a few of my husband’s old

grad students for him. Friends? Fine — but who will be alive?

No headstones. Cremation, with our ashes scattered on Austin’s Hike

and Bike Trail and the top of Mount Bonnell — places we have loved.

I don’t know when it was our daughter began to cry —our hard-

charging, accomplished professional daughter with tears flooding

her face. Our son claimed later it was when money and finances

were mentioned; his sister had always been sentimental about such

things, he reminded us. But by then, we were finished with our end-

of-life talk.

We moved to the living room with glasses of wine, the original four

of us. The two of us who used to be young and invulnerable parents,

the two whose births, toddler hoods, multiple cases of pink eye, and

adolescence my husband and I had witnessed. The four of us who’d

been inseparable for years until, suddenly, we weren’t.

We sat and we talked for another couple of hours. I’m not even sure

what we talked about — the past, mostly. Our intertwined lives.

How proud we are of them. “We must have been perfect parents,”

my husband said, and we burst out laughing. We all knew better.

What I remember most was the warmth in the room, the

comfort in one another’s presence, the laughter, the ease. “I never

had that kind of talk with my parents — ever,” my husband said

later. “I can’t even imagine it.”

How odd — he and I had gone through what was, in many ways, a

reckoning of our lives. The money we’d made, the assets we held,

the memories and work we wanted preserved, our earthly

accomplishments.

Those end-of-life summaries had passed quickly and easily. But it

was those last hours with our two adult children, whom we love more than

anyone else in the world, that will linger with us as long as we draw

breath.

Of everything both my husband and I have done in our lives,

these two human beings with their good hearts and wise-ass humor

are our greatest legacy, our proudest earthly accomplishment. They

and their families are the treasure we will leave behind.

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Remember Suffs? It’s the musical about American women’s finally securing the right to vote. This spring, my good friend Betsy saw it on Broadway.

“It was good,” she said afterwards. “But it wasn’t great. It wasn’t Hamilton.”

My husband and I agreed after we saw the traveling production of Suffs in Chicago. Good but not great. Made with the best of intentions. Stirring and emotional in parts but somehow, those moments couldn’t be sustained.

Maybe because Suffs failed to showcase a deeply personal story about the brutal outrages and helplessness of being denied the right to vote? Because Suffs’ final scene, with the cast exhorting us to keep on marching and marching, wasn’t inspiring and exalting? I don’t know. I’m not a playwright, just a theater-goer who’s been marching since the beginning of time, whose feet are screaming at her. Dammit, haven’t we all marched enough?

And again, Suffs wasn’t Hamilton. I know that’s an unfair comparison, since Hamilton was such a singular work of genius, lightning caught on the stage that still dazzles and wrenches the heart no matter how many times you see it, a phenomenon that won’t be equaled for generations. Along with the backdrop of an extraordinary moment in history, Hamilton also had a deeply personal tale of betrayal, heartbreak, and devastating loss at its core.

But anyone who cares about women’s rights wanted Suffs to be as overwhelming and inspirational as Hamilton, a triumph of spirit and revolution we are all desperate for. We need this kind of fire and reinvention at a time when women’s right to control their own bodies has been casually overruled by the US Supreme Court — a decision almost forgotten in the avalanche of other assaults on democracy, wars of choice, roving violence by hooded goons that we have simply grown numb to.

But loss of women’s rights? That can so easily be trivialized and ridiculed, especially in the wake of the political and cultural tsunami that’s swept through this country. There’s even talk in the manosphere about taking away women’s right to vote, usually uttered in one of those heh-heh, we’re-just-messin’-with-you-dumb-chicks voices.

Can’t we take a joke, ladies? They’re only kidding.

*****

(with my good friend Nettie Reynolds in Chicago)

The great triumph in Suffs is, of course, the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Its success was a near-miracle of tireless work, travel and lobbying; even so, that near-miracle only included white women at first.

The musical goes on after that triumph, ending with work on the Equal Rights Amendment and the underwhelming charge to keep marching. Like everyone else in the audience, I couldn’t forget the ERA eventually failed — and all the marching in the world couldn’t save it.

Maybe Suffs should have concluded with the great victory of suffrage — and forget about the demoralizing rest of the story. Why not focus longer on the real joy of that moment?

All of which reminds me of June 2013, when my friend Nettie Reynolds and I ran into each other at the filibuster by Texas state senator Wendy Davis. Packed into the balcony of the state capitol’s senate chamber with a rowdy bunch of other furious Texas women, Nettie and I listened to much of Davis’ 13-hour talk to jettison new restrictions on abortion. Thirteen hours Davis stood there, without water, food, or restroom breaks, and we the audience cheered and tweeted and hissed.

Around midnight, the Texas Department of Public Safety threw us out of our seats, with Nettie vehemently telling on officer to unhand her and me howling repeatedly not to injure my bad shoulder. Afterwards, she and I walked through a big rally downstairs and strolled down Congress Avenue to order hamburgers for a late dinner. We were sweaty and exhausted and exhilarated about defying the powers that be and by the changes that were surely coming because of us.

“You don’t know how much things have changed, how much better they are,” I told my husband when he came home from a long trip the next day. “Wendy’s filibuster! It was incredible!”

The delay on the abortion restrictions was overturned later that summer, of course, and the news for women’s rights has gotten far more bleak over the past few years. So much for things changing for the better.

But I still want my obituary to prominently feature my being thrown out of Wendy’s filibuster by the DPS. You have to take those wacky, jubilant hours and savor them as long as you can — even when you feel like Thelma and Louise having one hell of a wild time, then flying over a cliff in a convertible.

We women keep writing a great story for ourselves, don’t we? But tell me why in hell can’t we nail a happy ending?

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(Engaging in spirited repartee)

Granted, the building’s exterior is kind of an eyesore. But you forget that when you’re indoors, touring through vivid displays and gorgeous works of art, watching videos of critical moments we all lived through but have half forgotten, listening to eloquent speeches that crack your heart open. The whole experience is stunning, beautifully done, emotionally overwhelming.

For however long you can spend there, you are transported to a different time when we had a president whose words soared, who was patriotic and decent, whose decisions about the fate of our country and the world were thoughtful and carefully balanced.

As a nation, we have always been imperfect. But we once had aspirations for the greater good at home and in the world. The Obama Presidential Center reminds you of that — of what we’ve lost and need to reclaim.

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The furnace appears to be portable.

*****

Hot or not, you live in a place differently when your stay is temporary. There’s so much to do and you have so little time!

Here, we’ve been to the Mexican Art Museum, which is excellent. To the National Museum of Puerto Rican Culture, where we learned about three generations of women who used their traditional art of lace-making to enter the world of haute couture. To the Chicago History Museum, which, if you haven’t seen it, spins wonderful narratives about the city’s rise as a transportation center, an industrial hub, a furniture market, a bootlegging mecca, you name it — and is now reinventing itself for the 21st century.

*****

I grew up in a family who never went to the theater. For much of my life, I knew nothing about it. That changed when I saw the Broadway revival of Cabaret in 1998 with Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming. In a matter of hours, I became a full-blown theater nut who collects playbills by the ream and still doesn’t know what she paid to see the original cast of Hamilton but whatever it was, it was worth it.

Similarly, I’ve spent my life as a waste of space when it comes to the visual arts. But that was before last week, when my husband and I went to the storied Art Institute of Chicago.

First, it was Renoir’s Two Sisters. Was it the red hat? The innocent flushed faces of youth? The sheer genius and beauty on display? I don’t know, but my eyes filled with tears and I could tell I was becoming a basket case.

Then, a few minutes later, I got lightheaded. At first, I thought my blood sugar had crashed. But I stayed upright and continued to stare at the nearby paintings and their ecstatic colors and light.

It wasn’t my blood sugar, I realized. I was just gutted emotionally. I’d never been in a room with so many Monets. I’m going to have to come back again and again.

(Vetheuil, 1901. Monet created 15 paintings of this same landscape at different times of day. This is sunset, which the Art Institute owns, along with midday)

*****

By the way, I looked up the lyrics to Fred Fisher’s song “Chicago,” which refers to the city as “that toddlin’ town.” Turns out, the toddle was a Roaring Twenties dance where you hopped forward and kicked back. Heavy drinking evidently facilitates the moves if you want to toddle the right way.

*****

I’d been dreading this country’s 250th birthday because who wants to celebrate anything while a thieving mob boss and knuckle-dragging thugs loot the country and eviscerate the truths many of us still hold to be self evident? You know, it’s hard to get in the right mood.

But my husband and I were lucky to be able to spend this Fourth with our son, daughter in law and their two kids, along with several of their neighbors and their children. This is a group of 8 or 10 families who originally met during Covid when their oldest kids were infants at the same Ukrainian Village day care. (The kids can still count from 1 to 10 in Ukrainian, I should add.)

Since then, they have all moved within a few blocks of one another with their growing broods of kids.

“We feel like aunts and uncles to all these kids,” one told me, “and our kids are like cousins. They’ve grown up together.”

“I couldn’t have gotten through the first few months after the birth of our third child without these friends,” another said. “Somebody was always dropping off dinner or offering to babysit. It saved my life.”

I listened to those stories and eventually started to smile like a goofball because they made me so happy that our son and his family were a part of this — the kind of community all of us want in our lives. For a while, I forgot about the mob boss and thugs and listened to the adults talk and laugh and children race screaming through the house while the hosts grilled burgers and hot dogs outside.

Enjoying warm gatherings like this, a wealth of friends, and great works of art? What a week! I think I love this toddlin’ town.

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These two guys, who are dear friends of ours, used to be our neighbors in Austin. But now they’re hinting Chicago is better?

Really? Don’t they have any loyalty?

Trouble is, my husband and I can’t get in a word since the two of them are so busy gushing about Chicago.

“Everyone we meet loves it here!” Matt announces.

(If you ask me, Matt has a pretty low bar when it comes to civic appreciation. He’s originally from Seminole, one of the most dismal towns in West Texas. Seminole, as you may remember, was also the epicenter of a measles epidemic last year, when a bunch of people stopped vaccinating their kids.)

“Chicago’s the friendliest city!” says Peter. (He grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, which gives you a rough idea about his familiarity with friendly neighbors.)

MATT AND PETER, BIG-TIME CHICAGO BOOSTERS

“Any time you’re talking in a restaurant,” Peter continues, “you can be sure people are eavesdropping on you!”

He goes on to tell us what happened a week or two ago, when he and Matt were in a Chicago restaurant discussing their upcoming trip to Door County, Wisconsin. At the table next to them on the patio, two middle-aged parents and their teen son and daughter became more and more interested in their plans. Beginning as total strangers, everybody at the other table quickly became Peter and Matt’s travel planners.

First, they began offering suggestions about where Peter and Matt should go and what they should see. After all, they didn’t want to miss the real Wisconsin experience, did they? Coming up with more and more ideas, the family became more animated, talking louder and louder.

“You have to go to Big Skinny Gretchen’s to eat —“

“That’s not the name!”

“It’s Gretchen’s Deli — “

“No, it’s not!”

“We have to get the name right!”

“So,” Peter says, “Matt googled it and it was Little Fat Gretchen’s. It was also 200 miles out of our way. So we told them we probably wouldn’t be able to make it there.”

But the family at the next table was undeterred. They had other ideas.

“You know what?” the teen girl said. “Since you’re going to Wisconsin, you guys have got to meet the Millers — “

“The Millers! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that first —“

“You’re going to love the Millers!”

“Just drive to their dairy farm! We can let them know you’re coming!”

This went on for a while until Peter and Matt finished their meal and paid their tab. As they left the patio, the father waved his hand frantically.

“DON’T FORGET THE MILLERS!” he bellowed.

*****

Since our dinner with Peter and Matt, we’ve noticed the Midwestern friendliness here. They do have a point.

When my credit card messed up and I couldn’t get on the train, another passenger came by and paid my fare. A total stranger — and I was so surprised I’m not sure I thanked her loudly enough.

Then, there was the couple who stopped to ask us whether they could help my husband and me as we stood outside a downtown museum trying to decide where to go for dinner. We probably spoke with them a good 20 minutes, learning about a great Italian restaurant, then talking about the new Obama presidential center that just opened (which we have tickets for in a couple of weeks!).

We all agreed how much we missed the former president, his intelligence, his basic decency. We probably could have talked for hours longer, but we were hungry and the restaurant sounded great.

It’s funny, because our home state of Texas is also a very warm and friendly place, which I’ve always loved about it. But our statewide politics have grown meaner and more virulent in recent years. It’s bewildering and deeply painful for many of us.

How do you say this isn’t who we are as a people when the same politicians are returned to office term after term and their policies are increasingly discriminatory and cruel? Our state isn’t warm and friendly to all; it’s cruel and dismissive to immigrants, people of different faiths, non-believers, those who want public schools generously supported and free from religion.

Right now, though, my husband and I are on vacation in Chicago for a month, enjoying seeing our two younger grandchildren and our son and daughter-in-law who live here, meeting old and new friends, exploring the rich culture, loving the gorgeous summer weather. It occurs to me that maybe, for once, I can’t worry about everything rotten and festering in this world of ours. Maybe it’s time to take a break.

Besides, Peter and Matt just got back from Wisconsin and they had a great time, even though they weren’t able to make any of the connections or must-sees the travel-buff family suggested for them. If anybody’s going to meet the Millers, it may be up to my husband and me.

The Millers! We can’t forget the Millers!

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“I’m a writer, too!” she said loudly.

She seemed awfully bubbly and enthusiastic to be a writer, but what did I know? I’d been sulking all week about one thing after another. Maybe it was just me.

I asked how long she’d been writing

“A week!” she said. “Don’t you just love it? Writing is so relaxing!”

I guess I must have had a horrified expression on my face. The woman’s husband turned to her and hissed, “Honey, you know … I think she’s a real writer.”

What was it? The bags under my eyes or the whipped-cur look on my face?

Whatever it was, he was on to something. The couple said quick good-byes and made their way across the room. We’ve fallen out of touch since then.

*****

This brings me to rejection. I don’t have many certain beliefs, but I fervently believe if you find writing relaxing, then you’ve probably never been rejected. You’ve never had your body bludgeoned like Mr. Bill’s on Saturday Night Live. You’ve never sobbed and sworn that you were quitting writing, then peered through your swollen, bloodshot eyes and noticed nobody cared.

I’ve been writing for 50 or so years — which sounds kind of masochistic but it’s too late to change. I’ve had successes and failures and I’ve been rejected by the best and the worst and the mediocre. Early on, it devastated me. I’d go into fetal position for an hour or so, then rage-eat ice cream; Haagen-Dazs was always my drug of choice.

(Photo taken 20 or so years ago when filmmaker Errol Morris rejected footage of me for his Stand Up To Cancer special. It’s very hard to stand up to cancer or anything else when you’re in fetal position.)

Somewhere along the way, comparing notes with other writers, I learned to be a connoisseur of rejection letters. (Which were delivered by US mail and not by email back then.)

Most of them were pretty much the same: no thanks, not for us, thanks for trying. A very, very few were insulting (which always led me to think some people should rot in hell for eternity. I mean why the gratuitous meanness?)

But a very few others were actually complimentary. “I call them rave rejections,” Jane Barnes told me.

Jane was one of the many writer friends I made in Charlottesville, VA, where we lived then. She’d been writing longer and knew a lot more than most of us, so we all paid attention to her. Also she didn’t spend as much time whining as the rest of us did, I noticed.

Rave rejections! It was a teachable moment!

*****

Years and decades have passed since then. Like anybody who wants to survive a writing life, I learned to get over rejection more quickly and knock off the hours in fetal position. I’ve also moved from Haagen-Dazs to Jeni’s ice cream.

I’ve been published and rejected and watched the publishing industry struggle and morph and newspapers and magazines vanish. Looking back from this distance, I also see patterns I never noticed when I was young, living one day to the next.

I now realize that a careful and caring rejection can sometimes change your life. I got one of those rejections many years ago, when I was at one of the lowest periods of my professional life. I’ve never forgotten it. It was for a job I’d applied for at the Dallas Morning News and written by Judith Segura, who was a longtime executive there.

She told me I wasn’t right for a job, which I’m sure I wasn’t. But she went on to say that she hoped another opportunity would come along where the newspaper could use my “great talents.”

Great talents. I read those words over and over. They gave me hope and solace when I felt like I was circling the drain. They still make me tear up.

In fact, for years I felt like this was the all-time greatest rave rejection story in the annals of history. But then my husband managed to one-up me. (Typical.)

A longtime academic, he sent a rejection letter to a job applicant about 30 years ago, taking pains to let her know how accomplished and well-qualified she was. A few weeks ago, he got an email from her telling him how greatly she appreciated what he had written. Once a year, she wrote, she always re-read his letter and thought about how it had encouraged her and shaped her career.

(Once a year! Damn!)

*****

Anyway, I thought I was going to be writing today about getting rejection letters and soldiering on and doing the work. But maybe that isn’t really the point — which may speak to the later time of life I find myself in.

Maybe the point is that kindness can make a great difference even in the most trying of circumstances. Which makes me think I should have been more openhearted to the new writer I met all those years ago.

Maybe so, maybe not. But still! — calling yourself a writer after you’ve only written for a week? That’s in pretty miserable taste. She should have given it a month at the least. Then, we might have had something to talk about.

It was brutal. But again, we were in our 20s.

We felt guilty about our late schefflera, so we stopped buying houseplants. Since we were still in our 20s, though, we kept on giving parties.

Then we had kids — and our parties died down, along with our energy level. (Fortunately, we turned out to be better at rearing children than plants.)

Plant-free decades passed, our kids grew up and blew town, and my husband and I moved to a condo. During the lonely days of Covid, we became obsessed with the cacti and succulents in the rock garden next to us. Plants did quite well, we noticed, when my husband and I weren’t caring for them.

The squatty green succulents were called Queen Victoria agave. With age, many sprout 10-15’ spikes that shoot up in the spring. In weeks, our rock garden goes totally priapic (an obvious symbol of our current administration, if you ask me.) We called them dick plants for short.

After a while, we got bored with their dickish plant behavior and discovered we also had a night-blooming cereus cactus on our balcony. Amazing! In the early summer, the cereus grows a blossom or two — dazzling pink flowers etched in white.

We were thrilled. It was like being new parents again. We took photos and raved. But the blossoms only lived a day.

Last summer, our cereus outdid itself. Over a few days, it produced six different blossoms. We marveled to each other when three flowers flourished at the same time. Triplets!

But nature had its way. The blooms wilted, then turned dark within a day. It made me wonder why any plant would sprout such glorious blossoms that died so quickly. Maybe its pollen still spreads widely in those brief hours, a friend said.

Maybe — but so much effort for so little reward? Talk about foolish. Is that the best they can do?

Or maybe, in this vast universe of ours, some distant neighbor is chuckling, watching my husband and me leap around, so ecstatic about our cereus flowers.

There they are, the unknown neighbor thinks, those bizarre Earthlings with their own brief lives, celebrating nature as their planet heaves and burns.

Talk about foolish. Is that the best they can do?

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Let’s go back half a century. Here’s how it went, again and again.

My husband and I return to West Texas, where both sets of our parents live, for a holiday or weekend. A day or two into our stay, he and I sit down with his mother and grandmother so they can catch us up with the local news.

“You remember Alma Rogers,” my mother-in-law begins. “She — ”

“Who?” my husband says.

“Alma Rogers. She — ”

“Alma Who? Never heard of her!”

“Alma Rogers! Of course, you know her — ” my mother-in-law continues.

“No, I don’t,” he insists.

“ALMA ROGERS! You know her quite well!”

“Who?”

“ALMA ROGERS! Of course you know her!” my mother-in-law begins to scream. “She lived down the street — ”

“You’ve known Alma Rogers your entire life!” his grandmother chimes in.

“I have no idea who you’re talking about — ”

“OF COURSE YOU DO! ALMA ROGERS!”

“HER SON WAS ONE OF YOUR BEST FRIENDS!”

“YOU USED TO PLAY TOGETHER ALL THE TIME!!”

“No, I never knew her — ”

“YOU’VE KNOWN ALMA ROGERS SINCE YOU WERE BORN!!!”

This goes on for some time, always ending in garbled screams and assorted accusations and denials and much huffing and puffing. Eventually, it all dies down, and my husband — in a sudden excess of good will — says, “So what about Alma Rogers?”

His mother and grandmother, both hoarse and exhausted from all their yelling, are already settling into their noontime libation. They look up wearily. “Oh. Alma Rogers died,” his mother says.

Sometimes it’s Alma Rogers and sometimes it’s Harvey Schmidt, and sometimes it’s somebody else. But after all the yelling subsides, it’s invariably revealed that the person in question, who my husband still denies knowing, is dead.

Dead! That was the whole point of the conversation!

My husband and I always report the story to all our friends — all of whom, like us, were young and invulnerable and deeply amused. We collapse in laughter, then shake our heads and shrug. Old people were so funny, in kind of a pathetic way.

Well, you know how it goes from there. The old die, the young get old, the jokes stay the same, but the butt of the jokes is now staring you in the face every time you look in the mirror.

“All you talked about was people getting cancer and dying,” our daughter observed several years ago after my husband and I had run into some old friends from Virginia.

“That’s just because a lot of people we know have had cancer,” I said.

“Yeah, but that’s all you talked about,” she said.

That’s all we talked about! Ill health, the Big C, death. I think of this observation from time to time. Think about it in my yoga class, a few years ago, when the guy behind me comes back after several weeks’ absence. “Detached retina,” he says. “It was awful.”

I think about it as some friends slide, as others die, as the light takes on a different slant — that late afternoon lengthening of shadows. It’s happening all around us, it’s happening within us (the aches, the pains, the physical failures and changes that still surprise, but not as much as they used to).

What do we do with our altered circumstances as we age? I think about it a lot, since — obviously — I’m aging myself, along with my husband and all our contemporaries.

I want to understand it all better. I want to do it well, I want to be my age, without apology, appreciating that my body and mind are still chugging along. I want to recall how many of my friends didn’t live long enough to grow old — and that aging is a privilege.

Yeah, aging is a privilege, I say to that altered face in the mirror. A privilege to be the butt of the joke I used to howl at when I was young, when I didn’t understand half of what I do now.

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My husband and I have been traveling together for 54 years. When we return to European countries we first visited when we were young, we often come across ghosts of our former selves.

We are used to them, so they don’t surprise us – these careless semi-hippies, with their fresh faces, their unlimited energy and enthusiasm. They slept at night in train stations, if necessary, or in walk-up hotel rooms on high floors and bathrooms half a mile away. They were broke, but that was part of the adventure.

They amuse us, these kids.

But when we travel, not all ghosts make such easy companions.

*****

Over the past couple of decades, we’ve visited Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Tucson’s 390^th Memorial Museum, Normandy, and D-Day sites. These visits occurred as our parents’ generation – the cohort Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation -- grew old and more fragile and began to slip away. It felt more urgent to remember what they had done.

Both our fathers fought in Europe in World War II. They were very different men who fought under very different conditions.

My father-in-law, in his late 20s, had already finished two years at an Ivy League law school. He was a command pilot who flew 44 sorties over France and Germany, quickly rising in the ranks of the 390^th Battalion. His work was dangerous, but he never saw a drop of blood shed.

My father, who was half Chickasaw Indian, came from a poor family in Tulsa. He enlisted at 17, shortly after graduating from high school. I don’t think he’d ever been out of Oklahoma before. He came from a family who rarely traveled, except for their sons who went to war.

Daddy’s introduction to war was in the infantry at the infamous Battle of the Bulge. He saw his best friend Thomas killed there. My mother always said had they had a son, they would have named him for Thomas. My father himself never talked about the war.

*****

Earlier this month, my husband and I traveled from Barcelona to southeastern France with Bernard Rime, a Belgian psychologist and one of our dearest friends.

Bernard comes from a family whose lives were uprooted by the war – far beyond what either my husband’s or my family suffered. In 1940, his parents and other family members fled Belgium into France, joining a panicked mob of refugees trying to escape the chaos of the Nazi invasion. Overhead, German dive bombers attacked them relentlessly.

Bernard’s father and uncle were later taken prisoner by the Germans and forced to dig graves for the bodies scattered throughout the French countryside. All the family managed to eventually make their way back to Brussels, where they suffered four years of German occupation.

As it turned out, the French city we stayed in, Lyon, had played a critical role in the French Resistance. One afternoon, the three of us visited its Centre d’histoire de la resistance et de la deportation, a museum focusing on the resistance and the Nazis’ deportation of Jews.

The museum is located where a French military school had once been. During the war, Klaus Barbie, the local Gestapo head known as the Butcher of Lyon, occupied the school, where he tortured members of the resistance. Evidently, he enjoyed being personally involved in the torture. (Finally convicted of crimes against humanity in 1987, Barbie was sentenced to life in prison. Four years later, he died in prison in Lyon. Prostate cancer was the butcher’s ultimate torturer.)

Bernard, my husband, and I wandered through the museum, looking at wartime maps, viewing old black-and-white photographs of carnage and ruin, listening to accounts of resistance veterans who survived the war. One was Lucie Aubrac, who helped rescue her Resistance-fighter husband Raymond in a bloody attack on his Nazi captors. (“When you use lots of machine guns, people tend to die,” she noted matter-of-factly in a video.)

And Klaus Barbie himself, whose office she had barged into earlier, brazenly demanding he release her husband? “He dressed like a clerk,” she shrugged dismissively. “Not like a leader should dress!”

Watching those accounts of resistance fighters with their staggering sangfroid and lingering fashion sense, I wondered, as usual, what I would have done in their circumstances. I don’t have any illusions about my own potential for bravery, so I didn’t dwell on it long.

Still, I treasured those stories of those who resisted the Nazis, giants who risked everything.

*****

Around us, groups of French schoolchildren lingered quietly in the museum, reading and listening to accounts of a war their great- or great-great grandparents endured, the battles that cost so many millions of lives and changed the fate of the world. By forging strong post-WWII alliances, the US, France, and the UK had managed to build a peace and stability that have held for almost 80 years.

That peace and those lasting alliances were so painstaking to build and maintain, so easy to destroy. It’s troubling to be an American visiting WWII sites and museums at a time like this, when we have a president who’s endangering the world by alienating our longtime allies and cozying up to amoral strongmen.

For those of us who were born shortly after WWII and shaped by parents who had lived through that war, those post-war years now seem so shockingly distant, remnants of another era. Would the lessons and values from that war be remembered?

I looked at those French kids at the museum and wanted to warn them – as the old always want to warn the young – learn your history! Don’t forget the sacrifices and blood that was shed so you could have a better life!

The old always want to lecture the young, the young almost always dismiss their elders. So, of course, I didn’t say anything.

Bernard, though, seemed more optimistic than I was. “What moved me most actually was seeing the adolescents who were there at the museum and who took the visit very seriously,” he wrote us later. “Once or twice, I had tears in my eyes watching them. That was probably related to a feeling of continuity across generations.”

Which made me feel a bit better. After all, as a European, Bernard knows more history and takes a longer view than most Americans. And maybe he’s right. Maybe there’s reason to hope.

Anyway, as an American author once wrote, “It’s pretty to think so, isn’t it?”

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Just envision it:

Think of it. If Abe had been emoting and exclaiming on social media instead of the back of an envelope, his talk might have been immortal!

I’ve thought about these matters a lot for the past 15 or so years, dating back to when the exclamation and emoji onslaught started. Like all epidemics, it was unnerving. All of a sudden, growing numbers of people seemed to be panting and exclaiming and drawing little pictures instead of writing.

Ick. I’ve always thought that exclamation marks, in particular, were insidious. They’re just like voices rising in pitch — a little at a time, like boiling a frog. What’s wrong with a little higher pitch, a little warmer water, one lousy exclamation mark?

I’ll tell you. The next thing you know, you’re talking in falsetto, the frog is dead, and you’re incapable of writing a sentence, no matter how banal, without a stream of exclamation marks.

I would just wait for the epidemic to pass, I thought. Ignore it and people would return to their senses and start using normal punctuation marks like commas and periods and colons and semicolons again. They’d stop hyperventilating in print.

*****

Man, I got that one wrong.

Time passed. Exclamation marks and emojis didn’t. They exploded.

How do you resist the massive social pressure when everybody everywhere is using exclamation marks all the damned time? And not just single exclamation marks – multiples!!!

What do you do? After a while, you start looking at your own emails and texts, with their sedate punctuation, a little more critically. Aren’t they a bit lackluster? Will other people think you need Geritol? (Answer: no, they won’t. Anybody old enough to know what Geritol is won’t be using exclamation marks or emojis either.)

So, I grudgingly started adding in occasional exclamation marks when I wrote. Just a few, mostly for irony. Just so I looked a little with-it, a little peppy – even though no one, to my knowledge, has ever called me peppy, even when I’ve OD’d on coffee and needed to be sedated. (Overcaffeinated, I don’t look peppy; I just look batshit crazy.)

Worse, in a final capitulation, I even, God help me, used an occasional emoji. (Just hearts. I’m sentimental.)

And how did I feel about myself after that? I’m glad you asked.

I was in a shame spiral. I wanted to die. I’d turned into a total punctuation whore.

*****

Anyway, that was the state of my punctuation affairs when my husband and I met our daughter and son for dinner in April. We were all in DC for my husband’s induction into a big-deal science group.

The four of us were having a great time when my two turncoat children mentioned one of my flaws. “You never use exclamation marks in texts to us,” Child #1 said accusingly. “I ask if you can pick up the grandkids and you answer ‘Sure.’”

She shook her head sadly. “That’s all you say. Just ‘Sure.’”

Child #2 agreed. He’d noticed the same thing. With no barrage of exclamation marks, I didn’t seem enthusiastic about, well, anything. It was a problem, verging on a crisis.

This went on for a few minutes. Then Child #1 grudgingly mentioned her father — the big-deal inductee — also wasn’t very exclamatory in his own texts. So at least I wasn’t the only punctuation failure in the family.

In the days that followed, I answered every text from both kids with a small army of exclamation marks. A plethora of those suckers. I punctuated like somebody who was deranged or on drugs. I even broke a nail in my exclamation mark frenzy.

Our daughter took a screen shot of one of our text exchanges and posted it on Instagram. It was quite popular, she reported. Lots of friends complained that their parents, too, were deficient when it came to exclamation marks. They just couldn’t seem to learn, even when reminded over and over. It was really kind of tragic.

Oh, hell, I thought. So it’s generational. The world against Baby Boomers, as usual. Typical. My cohort and I get blamed for everything.

After all that sturm und drang, I’m now exhausted by the constant pressure to be enthusiastic and exclamatory and emotional all the fucking time. In the future, I tell myself, I’ll only exclaim and emote and pant when I feel like it.

I’m thinking that may be never.

In the meantime, pass the Geritol, baby. I’m sure I’m gonna need it.

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Adult! Respectable!

So, naturally, our daughter and son-in-law and my husband and I hotfoot it from Austin to Chicago for his birthday party. After all, our daughter, my husband, and I —all first-borns — freely admit our second-born son is by far the nicest person in our family. He’s wonderful, in fact.

(the birthday boy is second from the right)

His house overflows — friends from Chicago, from various jobs and sports teams, a fair number of guys from work and high school in Austin who have traveled from around the country. It’s so loud and crowded some of us move into the backyard and huddle in front of a heat lamp, drinking and talking.

I join a small group with my son and his old friends, most of whom I’ve known for decades. God knows what they were talking about before I glommed onto their group, but now it’s musings about life with young children, their work, their constant busyness in their mid-years.

Listening to them reminds what a lovely, solid group of guys they are. It also makes me think that what most of us parents want for our kids early on – talented and gifted classes! acclaim from teachers, other parents, their peers! — is superficial bullshit. You have to be longer in the tooth to finally figure out what’s most important for your kid is to have an open heart, to be a good friend.

Too bad it takes us so long understand that. But I’ve always thought that child-rearing changes parents as much as children.

*****

Going to a party mostly with millennials, I remind myself how we with the long teeth have the reputation for droning on and on too much. (Truth is, I could also name plenty of young and middle-aged bores who need a conversation monitor reining them in. But never mind.)

With age, though, you become more sensitive to stereotypes about your generation — and why not? It’s not a bad thing to worry about whether you’re boring people. I wish everybody did.

Right now, for the most part, I conveniently forget my age. It’s only when my feet scream at me, my energy vanishes, or I’m surrounded by younger people that I notice. (Oh, that’s right! I’m 76.)

At times like this, I swear I can feel the ground shifting under me. Assuming the center is holding, it’s moving further and further away from me and my generation.

And what’s that I hear? Oh, yeah, it’s the exit music. Jeez, it’s getting deafening.

So, even though it’s my only son’s birthday party and I have quite a few stories to tell about my pregnancy with him and his birth and childhood, I’ll keep them to myself.

For example, I won’t tell:

• about January 1986, when I was seven months’ pregnant with him and watching the liftoff of the Challenger space shuttle on TV with a room full of colleagues from the Dallas public TV and radio station.

  When the shuttle exploded, killing all seven astronauts, I was so upset that my son began to thrash inside me. My co-workers gathered around me, touching my midriff and noticing the baby’s violent movements. It was a feeling of real warmth and caring on a day that was cold and heartbreaking.

• Or how, two months later, I was hula-hooping in our backyard while my husband grilled a steak (and let me tell you, it’s hard to hula-hoop when you’re 9-1/2 months pregnant and asymmetric as a scalene trapezoid). I began to feel regular twinges and my husband rushed me to the hospital, where I gave birth four hours later. Our son and I stayed in the hospital two nights and my husband returned home to polish off the steak; that’s the patriarchy for you.

• Or about the time the middle-school principal called me about our son, who’d been caught dialing 1-800-SPANKME on a school payphone. “We take these violations very seriously,” the principal intoned, pompous as a Bible Belt preacher. At the other end of the line, I tried not to screech with laughter. (1-800-SPANKME? What a riot! My husband and I laughed about it for weeks.)

• Or the small gambling empire our son ran in high school, which we only heard about when he was in college. “He always was enterprising,” my husband says.

So many stories we have loved for decades, so little time to repeat them once more. Oh, well. Especially now, at our much-loved son’s 40th birthday — it was his and and his generation’s day to take center stage. Time for them to tell their own stories.

It wasn’t mine. Besides, I’m a writer and my best stories have almost always been silent.

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The sky, the sky! If you’ve grown up with those expansive horizons that stretch on forever, you never quite feel at home anywhere else. You can lose yourself in that world overhead, imagining your possibilities are unlimited and there’s abundant promise in the world.

The sky, the sky! You forget the earth beneath it is being claimed and carved up and controlled by devious, greedy little men and a few women in the gleaming state capitol a mile away, where human rights are efficiently being ground into waste and compost.

Given the politics, why do you live in Texas? — that’s a question most of us get asked from time to time. Maybe because it’s home and maybe because — in spite of ourselves— we keep expecting our state to live up to the grandeur of its sky.

(Photo by Bennett Blodgett of his son and our grandson James in front of the Austin skyline and an approaching storm)

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But six months ago, I got a text from Ed Pesik, my best friend from law school. He and his partner would be flying from Seattle to Austin for the reunion in April, he said.

It was a shock. Ed is wretched about staying in touch and totally unsentimental about UT and Austin. I couldn’t believe he’d lower himself to come to anything as mawkish as a reunion. Maybe he’d had a stroke or something.

But I told him I’d join him. After all, I lived in Austin anyway.

*****

Remember 1973? That was the year I began law school. Roe v. Wade has just become the law of the land and Richard Nixon was ensnared and flailing in Watergate. The world was changing, the air was fresher and different, and a vast new generation of Baby Boomers was maturing. Women were yelling and marching since we were sick of being doormats and Helen Reddy was belting out a great new song about how strong and powerful we were. It was a heady time.

I was 23, awkward and shy, directionless, armed with a BA in comparative literature and a few wispy dreams, and newly married to a husband who was going to grad school. I was good at school myself and I was a feminist, so I felt I needed to do something significant. Why not law school?

Listen — to a 23-year-old who was screamingly immature and really kind of a mess, it sounded like a plan.

*****

Going to law school was like entering another world, learning a new language that exuded power. I became completely immersed in this land of heavy, featureless books and crowded halls bulging with people who were in a hurry and obviously had a purpose in life. Since I was quite good at noticing my own shortcomings, I quickly figured out I didn’t have a natural legal mind like some of the other students. But I tried to make up for it by working all the time, studying constantly and indiscriminately. (Working smart was something I didn’t learn till my 30s.)

Feminist movement or not, young women, especially shy women like me, weren’t taken seriously back then. We probably didn’t even take ourselves seriously. Worse, men routinely interrupted us or talked over us. And yeah, I know that still goes on too damned much, but believe me, it was worse then.

Just a few weeks into law school, though, I got more respect and attention from the outside world than I’d ever gotten before. It was exhilarating. All I had to do was mention I was a law student at parties and people looked at me differently. I could feel it. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was somebody. I’m pretty sure my posture even improved.

*****

It wasn’t all cocktail chats, of course. In classes, professors — almost all male and mostly old — were emperors of their space. God, those guys ruled, a few of them cruelly. Most students were intimidated by them, but I had a phobia about public speaking and lived in terror most days. Looking back, I’m amazed I survived.

Women comprised a record 16% of our first-year class, a big enough presence to feel like we weren’t freaks. (“Take a picture! It’s a lady lawyer!” one of my parents’ friends said when she met me. That kind of knee-slapping hilarity persisted longer than you might think.)

But the women law school students watched out for one another. My study group was all women and many of us also studied at tables in the women’s large restroom, although God knows why. Maybe we felt safer there. Also, it was easy to score a tampon when you were in a rush.

*****
I graduated with honors three years later, one of those miraculous “Nevertheless, she persisted” moments. It helped that I could write the hell out of all those exam answers on the flimsy blue notebooks they passed out every year.

At graduation, though, I felt a sense of mild shock when my classmates excitedly exchanged plans for their upcoming jobs. Many of them were people who’d dreamed of being lawyers since childhood, many who couldn’t wait to practice.

Not me. I’d come to like law school just fine. Couldn’t I just stay in school studying something else? Did I really have to do law for the rest of my life? What had I gotten myself into?

Also, as I thought about it, I didn’t like conflict. In fact, I hated it. I wasn’t a warrior. Don’t tell me I could have taken a quiet job doing wills and estates; I didn’t like reading the fine print, either.

I’d spent three years of my life pursuing a law degree, but fortunately, I had almost no debt, since in-state tuition in the ‘70s was $150 a semester and Austin was dirt-cheap then. I practiced law for a year while my husband finished his dissertation, then worked at a wretched job at a legal publishing house that was like being sentenced to the middle regions of hell, assuming there is such a thing.

A couple of years later, the first essay I’d written and submitted was published by the Washington Post. I took it as a sign. I could spend my life busting my ass and aspiring to mediocrity as a lawyer. Or I could do something I was inherently good at and enjoyed.

I quit my job and quit the law and became a writer.

*****
So here I am in 2026 at the UT law school reunion, feeling out of place and a little apologetic. I’ve had a good career as a writer, but it’s not like I’ve written a best-seller or won a Pulitzer or anything.

“Why’d you go into writing?” someone asks me.

“I’ve always been attracted to low-paying work,” I tell him. It’s my usual line. Unfortunately, it’s also true.

To my shock, though, many of my old classmates come up to compliment my writing. I start feeling less apologetic. (“They read me! They actually read me!” my mind trills, like I was getting an Oscar or something. I’ve always been such a cheap date.)

We all go around go around peering at one another’s nametags; the names are in giant print, thank God. Like most reunions after such a long span of time, this gathering feels relaxed. The fierce competitiveness that drove us in law school seems to have shriveled along with our skin tone.

In our mid-70s and up, we are who we are. Also, most of us are a little dazed by the passage of time — half a century! — and by the number of classmates (60 or so, out of the original 550) listed on the In Memoriam list.

Beyond that, everyone’s story is different. Some professional success, comfortable lives. Lots of travel in recent years. Long-time marriages, children and grandchildren, spouses who died or are seriously ill. Our class hippie, I hear, made millions in the oil business and is now a Republican. “He hates paying taxes,” someone tells me.

My friend Ed — who, it turns out, is in great health — and I visit the law school the next morning. It’s far larger and more luxurious than it was when we were there — and also houses classes that are more than 50 percent women these days. We go to classrooms to hear panels talk about the U.S. Supreme Court and college athletics.

“Can we take coffee into the rooms?” someone asks hesitantly.

“We can do anything we want,” I tell her. “What are they going to do — flunk us?”

Still, heading into those rooms, I feel my stomach clench a bit. It’s mortifying. So much for bravado.

*****

Fifty years later, why are my memories of law school so vivid and indelible? Throughout the weekend, I keep sensing we are all being haunted by the people we used to be — those apple-cheeked kids, only masquerading as adults, with their buoyant plans and silent terrors. And haunted, too, by the paths we’d taken and the paths we hadn’t.

How had we done with our lives, anyway? Isn’t that what most reunions are about — a kind of reckoning?

I’d been fortunate. I’d stumbled into a career I loved, my husband and I were happy and growing old together, our children had children of their own.

And I’ve never regretted going to law school. My years there were three of the most intense and grueling of my life. But I’d survived it and done well. Maybe I was tougher than I’d always assumed.

Truth is, going to law school changed my life. It gave me the invaluable asset of belief in myself.

Or wait, let me re-phrase that:

I’d earned that confidence myself, damn it, with my own sweat and hard work and stubbornness -- back when I was young and tuition and Austin were cheap and Roe v. Wade was the law of the land and Richard Nixon was on his way out and the unblemished future stretched on forever.

It was a good time to be in law school. Hell, it was a great time to be alive.

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There’s nothing more important to me than connecting with others. That’s why I write and why I can’t stop talking to total strangers in airports, grocery stores, gyms, doctors’ offices, or any line I’m waiting in for longer than 15 seconds. I am incorrigible.

Why not strike up a conversation? After all, who knows what or who I’ll miss if I don’t?

The months of near-isolation during Covid made most of us a little batty from being deprived of human contact — but I was probably nuttier than most. In fact, I couldn’t have thought of any malady more painful than one that makes you afraid of being physically close to other people.

The first road trip my husband and I took after we were safely vaccinated, I felt some kind of overwhelming hunger to talk to everybody we met. At some points, my husband began yanking gently on my sleeve, clearly viewing me as some kind of helium balloon run amok. Too bad. I had so many people I needed to meet, so many stories I needed to hear, after months of only the two of us in a small place.

Truth is, I probably needed to be sedated or something, and coffee didn’t seem to be working.

*****

I can’t explain how I came by that irrepressible need to connect or why I don’t even try to resist it. But my sister and only sibling, Ellen, shared it, too. In fact, when she moved in Poland, her friends there called her “Nokia.” That was because she loved reaching out, making friends, introducing them to one another, putting them all in touch, they told me.

Maybe our need to connect with others was genetic. Or maybe it came from our lonely childhoods in small West Texas cities, where the wind spat red dust and rattled the windows.

Indoors, it was stifling. We grew up in small rancher houses where you could almost smell the disappointment and sadness in the air. Life hadn’t turned out the way our good-looking, popular parents had expected; it wasn’t like high school or college. Money was scarce, our father didn’t get promoted at work, our mother was deeply depressed.

To lift our family’s spirits, Mother often Scotch-taped uplifting Bible quotes and peppy commands to smile big and look on the bright side all over the kitchen cabinets — the kind of desperate, threadbare assurances that always made us feel worse. The Kitchen Scotch-Tape Commandments may also be why Ellen and I didn’t smile much, always avoided kitchens, and never learned to cook. Unhappy childhoods mark you in strange ways.

*****

Decades have come and gone since then. So many close and irreplaceable friends have left this Earth and Ellen died in Poland almost eight years ago. Since she was my only sibling, I still talk to her sometimes and halfway expect her to answer me. She would be so outraged by the casual cruelty of these times, I know.

But I’m fortunate to have husband, my extended family, and other friends close by. And even so, I still have an insatiable need to connect. It’s one of those permanent qualities I’ll never shake, like having bad feet.

Strangely – for someone who can’t cook -- one of my favorite means of connection is hosting small dinner parties. My husband loves to cook, for some reason, so I never have to touch a kitchen implement until I’m scraping saucepans and loading the dishwasher. (I’m also good at inviting people to dinner, so I’m not a total waste of space at these events; if our social schedule were up to my husband, we’d be hermits.)

Especially in these tumultuous times when I fear the Earth may be dying either from climate incineration or the festering rot of meanness, these small gatherings — when everybody talks and everybody listens and the conversation is freewheeling and unpredictable and generous — those times nourish and satisfy me in a way food never will.

So maybe that’s what I’m attempting to do in Just Another Blue Hour Dame — to host a dinner party without food. Just good talk and better listening, and I promise never to cook. Hey — it could work.

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