Life Happens : And Other Unavoidable Truths

by SCHULTZ, CONNIE

• ISBN13: 9781400064977
• ISBN10: 140006497X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-04-18
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

From the 2005 Pulitzer Prize'”winning columnist Connie Schultz comes fresh, clever, insightful commentary on life today: love, politics, social issues, family, and much, much more. In the tradition of Anna Quindlen, Molly Ivins, and Erma Bombeck, but with a distinctive voice and sensibility all her own, Connie Schultz comes out of the heartland of America to get you seeing, feeling, and thinking more deeply about the lives we lead today. 'œYou might spot someone you know in the stories here,' writes Connie. 'œMaybe you'll even find a glimpse of yourself. Yes, each of us is unique, but life happens in ways that bind us like Gorilla Glue.' In Life Happens, Connie shares sharp, passionate observations, winning our hearts with personal thoughts on a wide range of topics, from finding love in middle age to the meaning behind her father's lunch pail, from single motherhood, to who really gets the tips you leave and why as the war in Iraq, race relations, gay marriage, and wwhy women don't vote. In a more humorous vein, Connie shares her mother's advice on men ('œDon't marry him until you see how he treats the waitress') and warns men everywhere against using the dreaded f-word (it's not the one you think). Along the way, Connie introduces us to the heroic people who populate our world and shows us how just one person can make a difference. Charming, provocative, funny, and perceptive, Life Happens gives us, for the first time, Connie Schultz's celebrated commentary in one irresistible volume. Life Happens challenges us to be more open and alive to others and to the world around us.

Author Biography

Connie Schultz, a bi-weekly columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2005. Her other accolades include the Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award, the National Headliner Award, the Batten Medal, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for social-justice reporting. Her narrative series “The Burden of Innocence,” which chronicled the life of a man wrongly incarcerated for rape, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. After the series ran, the real rapist turned himself in, and he is now serving a five-year prison sentence. vote. In a more humorous vein, Connie shares her mother’s advice on men (“Don’t marry him until you see how he treats the waitress”) and warns men everywhere against using the dreaded f-word (it’s not the one you think). Along the way, Connie introduces us to the heroic people who populate our world and shows us how just one person can make a difference.

Charming, provocative, funny, and perceptive, Life Happens gives us, for the first time, Connie Schultz’s celebrated commentary in one irresistible volume. Life Happens challenges us to be more open and alive to others and to the world around us.

Connie is married to Ohio’s popular congressman Sherrod Brown.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Life Happens	1	(34)
This Four-Letter Word Is a Male Land Mine	7	(3)
A Gift That Mom Would Have Loved	10	(3)
A Plane Is Missed, but Time Is Not Lost	13	(2)
Never Blue in a Denim Shirt	15	(2)
Never Too Late to Slay a Dragon	17	(2)
A Fond Look Back at a Home for Two	19	(2)
Stories to Make Us Stop and Wonder	21	(2)
Snow Tests the Muscle of a Bookish Family	23	(2)
A Father's Gift Gives Him Away	25	(2)
A Dire Warning from a Grieving Dad	27	(2)
Trying to Remember How Happy We Are	29	(2)
Getting to Live Out Every Guy's Dream	31	(4)
Love in the Middle Ages	35	(34)
Just Don't Call Me Miss Direction	39	(3)
Relationship Rains Cats and Dogs	42	(3)
Learning to Dig Gardening	45	(3)
Sidestepping Manure in the Garden of Love	48	(3)
When Your Heart Knows He's the One	51	(2)
Everyone's Asking: His Name or Mine?	53	(2)
We're Given License to Let Go of the Past	55	(3)
Cake and Flowers on Mom's Birthday	58	(2)
Exchanging Sweet Nothings	60	(3)
Baseball Is Still His Field of Dreams	63	(3)
Love Him, Love His Dogs?	66	(3)
You've Got to Be Kidding	69	(26)
A Ringing Cell Phone Has My Number	73	(3)
Worry Weighs a Flier Down	76	(2)
Browns Policy Needs a Change	78	(2)
Pedometer Craze Is Taken in Stride	80	(2)
We Will Reveal Those Who Conceal	82	(2)
An Unsung Alto's Soprano Envy	84	(2)
No Other Capitalist Would Sell as Sweet	86	(2)
Giving Birth to a Dinosaur	88	(2)
Baring the Injustice of a Breast-feeding Ban	90	(2)
``Refugee'' Tag Adds Insult to Injury	92	(3)
Family Values	95	(22)
Nothing Broken Here; This Is a Whole Family	99	(3)
Most Divorced Dads Deserve to See Their Kids	102	(2)
Neighborhood Kids Mourn a Friend	104	(2)
Be the Parent, Not the Bartender	106	(2)
A Tot's Best Friend Is Her Blankie	108	(3)
A Moment of Joy in a House Divided	111	(3)
Harried Moms Have to Breathe	114	(3)
Blue-Collar Blues	117	(36)
A Promise in a Lunch Pail	122	(2)
Balance Is Lost in a Wireless World	124	(2)
Servers Deserve Our Respect---and Tips	126	(3)
Don't Dismiss Trailer Parks	129	(2)
The Real Gift of Doing unto Others	131	(2)
Here's a Little Tip About Gratuities	133	(3)
An Unfair Burden	136	(4)
``Working Class'' Becomes a Style	140	(2)
Sick, Uninsured, and Desperate for Help	142	(2)
Flushing Trouble Down the Drain	144	(3)
No Living Wage for Airport Aides	147	(3)
Free to Cast a Ballot, Even When Confined	150	(3)
Do Write Woman	153	(24)
The Long and Short of My Hairstyle	156	(2)
And You Think It's a Pain to Vote	158	(2)
Carrying the Torch for Women of All Ages	160	(2)
A Ploy for Ratings Stripped of Pretense	162	(2)
Rule on Wife's Role Bends Only for Him	164	(3)
Antiabortion Sermons and Catholic Women	167	(2)
Inciteful Insight: The Wisdom of a Simple Phrase Challenges and Inspires Women	169	(4)
The Queen of Soul Still Rules Our Hearts	173	(2)
More Women Need to Run for Office	175	(2)
Keeping the Faith	177	(26)
It's Not Christian to Champion Hate	182	(2)
Harry Chapin Inspired Goodwill Toward Men	184	(3)
Merry Christmas Everyone---or Else	187	(2)
From the Man Who Did the Time: ``I Harbor No Bitterness''	189	(3)
The Ugliness Comes from Both Extremes	192	(2)
Answering Hostility with Amazing Grace	194	(2)
No Pledge Needed to Show Our Faith	196	(2)
Seder of Hope: Jewish Rituals Feed This Gentile's Soul	198	(3)
Never Doubt That Santa's There	201	(2)
The Perfect Couple	203	(20)
A Perfect Couple, an Imperfect World	206	(2)
SpongeBob Caught in a Squeeze Play	208	(3)
Sometimes Love Takes Courage	211	(2)
Ohio Pulls Away the Welcome Mat	213	(2)
Survivor Displays a Dogged Resolve	215	(2)
Clasped Hands Can Open Hearts	217	(3)
A Clever Conspiracy to Attack Marriage	220	(3)
Battle Fatigue	223	(30)
The Drumbeat of War Is a Sorrowful Sound	228	(2)
A War Death Hits Where a Brother Lives	230	(2)
A Soldier Salutes Her Fallen Friends	232	(2)
For Parents, War Is Too Close	234	(2)
The Horrors of War Remain Bottled Up Inside	236	(2)
First-Class Ways to Support Our Troops	238	(2)
``We Die Along with These Kids''	240	(4)
A Caring Embrace for the Hurting	244	(2)
A Mom Buries Her Fears Along with Her Son	246	(3)
Honoring a Marine and a Grieving Mom	249	(4)
Growing Away	253	(24)
A Daughter's Doll Teaches Mom a Lesson on Race	257	(2)
The View from the Dugout	259	(2)
Starting the Day with a Bang	261	(3)
Looking Back and Ahead as a Child Grows Up	264	(2)
She's Ready to Drive Her Mother Crazy	266	(3)
It's Hard to Know When Not to Parent	269	(2)
A Parent's Disorienting Trip	271	(3)
I Thank My Lucky Stars for a Child at College	274	(3)
Acknowledgments	277

Excerpts

I grew up thinking you had to hate what you did for a living.

That single belief of my childhood probably explains more about who I am and how I became a writer than anything else I could tell you.

My first eighteen years were spent in a small Ohio town that most people passed through on their way to somewhere else. It’s called Ashtabula. You Bob Dylan fans may recall it was his creative reach for a rhyme to “Honolulu” in his song “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.”

There are so many other towns just like Ashtabula all over the country. These towns are anonymous places where most of America does its living and dying. It’s funny, really, how much all of us, from big-city folks to little-town people, resemble one another at the end of the day. In my town we didn’t have Central Park or Hollywood Boulevard, but we did have the lady down the street leave her husband for her sister’s husband, and don’t even try telling me that isn’t the stuff of made-for-TV movies. Hubert Humphrey even visited our town once. Dad shook his hand and got him on a home movie, which we always watched right before the scene of me putting my doll in the toilet.

Without meaning to, my father taught me early that work was something you just had to put up with so you could enjoy the few hours you had left in any day, any life. He was one of those workers who showered at the end of the day, after his shift at the plant was done. For thirty-six years he worked for the local utility plant, and for thirty-six years he despised his job and what he was sure it said about him as a human being.

Most nights, Mom and all four of us kids would join Dad at the dinner table and, likely as not, he would tell another story from his day on the job. He included funny tales about coworkers and pleas for a different Hostess pie in his lunch pail, but mostly he talked about abusive supervisors and backbreaking work in temperatures that easily topped 100 degrees in the summer. He offered up his stories as mounting evidence of just how much he didn’t matter.

“Do you know what that bastard did to me today?” he’d say, not waiting for an answer before describing yet again how he was worse than invisible to the man ordering him around day in and day out.

“You kids are going to college,” he’d say, over and over. “You kids are going to be somebody.”

It was an order.

I am his oldest child, and over the years it grew harder and harder to watch that hurt masquerading as rage getting such a choke hold on my father’s view of himself and his life. He was my dad, the man I most respected and feared. He filled up our house in that way that ferocious men do, but he was nobody out there, in that hulking factory where he spent the bulk of his days and too many overtime nights.

I used to envy the bankers’ kids, the lawyers’ and doctors’ kids, even the kids whose dads were just insurance salesmen. I didn’t envy their fathers’ professions, just their access. Their fathers had offices their children could visit, secretaries and receptionists who would look up at them from tidy desks and say, “Your dad’s on the phone, honey. Have a seat until he waves you in.”

My dad worked in a place we could only see from the shores of Lake Erie. Sometimes, my mother would take us to a small patch of beach called Lake Shore Park. Gathering her chicks around her, she’d point to the smokestacks puffing huge gray clouds into the sky several miles away.

“Your daddy’s over there,” she’d yell. “Wave real hard and maybe he’ll see us.”

There we were, four skinny kids with the same bony knees, flapping and yelling, “Hi, Daddy!” as if he could actually hear us over the roar of the plant. One of those times, when I was about ten, I looked back at my mother as we hooted and hollered and saw that she wasn’t waving anymore. She just stood there, staring at those ugly smokestacks with a face I’d never seen her wear before. Through her eyes, I had just seen the enemy.

I never waved at the plant again.

Whenever my father talked about work at the dinner table, my mother would quietly listen, but the look on her face told me all I needed to know about what she was really thinking. Here was her big, burly husband, the only man she would ever love, and, oh, how she loved him, being mistreated in ways she would never visit on a dog. That’s a hard thing for a woman who loves her man, and I still wince at the memory of my tiny mother trying to lift up her fallen giant.

“They don’t know you like I know you,” she’d say, passing him a second helping of mashed potatoes, maybe asking if he’d like some canned peaches for dessert. I’m sure that, at such moments, there must have been an occasional look of tenderness between them, but I only remember my father staring straight ahead, his eyes narrowed in disbelief that this was his life.

At the beginning of my senior year, my high school guidance counselor, Joe Petro, asked me what I wanted to study in college. I’d never given it much thought, since all I really knew about college was what my parents told me: I had to go for four years, and I’d better have a job at the end.

“Well,” I said, “I thought I’d be a social worker.”

He frowned, shook his head. “I know you, Connie. You’ll burn out.”

He looked down at my test scores and tapped his finger on the page. “You’re good in English, and your writing scores are great. Have you ever thought of going into journalism?”

He looked at my blank face and smiled.

“You’re going to be working for a long time,” he said. “You’d better pick something you really like to do.”

Just like that, life happens: a sudden wide-awake flash changes, not just what you are, but who you are. Until that moment in Mr. Petro’s dingy office, it had never occurred to me that I could love what I do for a living. In an instant, there it was: my brand-new life.

Before I became a columnist, I was a reporter for more than twenty years. It was a career dug in the rich soil of other people’s lives, and that is fertile ground. Like many journalists, I am often asked how I get people to open up and talk so much, as if we keep some sort of magic dust in our pockets that we can scoop out and sprinkle around.

Truth be told, I spend a lot of time just paying attention. There are few people, indeed, who feel really heard on a regular basis. Who among us have enough people in our lives who hang on our every word, who know how life happened for us, and how it happens still? Good journalists ask great questions, but the best stories come about only when we shut up and listen. I haven’t met a person who doesn’t have at least one good tale, and if I leave an interview without hearing it, I always feel the blame is mine. Keeps the standard high.

All these years later, I still can’t quite believe I get paid to do this for a living. I left behind my working-class life, but its roots run long and deep, and they keep me tethered to values that steer my every step. While we’re clearly a country deeply divided, I find myself constantly stumbling onto common ground.

You might spot someone you know in the stories here. Maybe you’ll even find a glimpse of yourself. Yes, yes, I know, each of us is unique, but life happens in ways that bind us like Gorilla Glue. There’s something universally comforting in the folds of a worn denim shirt or a house that promises to hold on to our memories no matter how far we move. Maybe you, too, have been stopped dead in your tracks by a sign that assures us there’s something bigger at work than our own stubborn will.

No matter where we live, we all have those moments when a sudden reminder of life’s brevity changes us, at least for a little while. In that quiet moment of surrender, life happens.

THIS FOUR-LETTER WORD IS A MALE LAND MINE

Men, I’m going to share with you a little tip that could change your life.

Women hate the f-word.

We especially hate when you use it, because your timing couldn’t be worse if you were the mistress making a toast at her boyfriend’s wedding.

At the precise moment when we are at our most vulnerable, our most needy, anxiously standing before you and hanging on your every word, you fling the f-word at us like a hunk of day-old hash and then wonder why we’re reaching for the nearest steak knife.

“What?” you always say. “What did I do? What did I say?”

Learn from this story:

One of my friends walked over to my desk recently with his head hanging lower than the tail of a freshly neutered hound dog. Naturally, I was concerned.

“Now what did you do?”

He shook his head, mumbled his wife’s name. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

“What did you do?”

He threw his hands up in disgust. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Again, I ask you, what did you do?”

He sighed, avoided eye contact. (A dead giveaway.)

“Okay,” he said. “I’m standing in the kitchen minding my own business, cookin’ a little oatmeal, drinkin’ a little coffee, when she waltzes in wearing some new outfit and says, ‘How do I look?’ ”

Oh, no.

He shrugged his shoulders. “So, I said, ‘You—’ ”

No, no.

“ ‘Look—’ ”

No, no, no.

“ ‘Fine.’ ”

There it is: the dreaded f-word.

“I can’t help you,” I told him. “If you had insulted her mom, maybe. If you had forgotten her birthday, perhaps. But you said she looks fine. There’s nothing to be done now.”

How does this happen? Most men I know can launch into an hour-long lecture on everything from how much air belongs in my tires to the precise wattage of lightbulb that should be screwed into every socket in my house. These same men turn into monosyllabic goofballs when asked to comment on the appearance of the woman they supposedly love.

Fine? We look fine?

When we ask, “How do I look?” we want a response rivaling the great ardor of your brothers across the sea. We want the passion of Italy, the romance of France, the fervor of Greece.

You give us Switzerland.

When you say, “You look fine,” and perform that little palms-up flip, our creative minds kick into overdrive. We hear:

“I’ve seen Wide World of Bowling highlights more exciting than you in that dress.”

“(Yawn.) I’m sorry, were you talking to me?”

“Whoa, when did the back-fat thing happen?”

None of these will ever land you on the right side of the heart-shaped tub.

One of my male friends tells me, “Look, when we say ‘fine,’ all we mean is, ‘We’re running late, get the keys, let’s go.’ ”

It is to laugh.

That wouldn’t explain those grunts from the Bimini BarcaLounger during Sunday football games, would it? Nor does it shed any light on why you say it right before we meet your mother or head into the gym for your high school reunion populated with twenty of your old girlfriends.

(Neither of these happened to me, but I did bear witness to these unfortunate moments and both times “you look fine” made for one very long night for men named George. I’m not saying you Georges of the world are more likely to commit the crime, but you do seem to get less benefit of the doubt than men named Preston, say, or Kip.)

Now, I know the next question: Well, if you don’t like the f-word, what should we say?

So glad you asked.

You are hereby encouraged to use the m-f word.

Here’s how it works:

She says, “How do I look?”

You say, “You look mighty fine.”

My work is done.

A GIFT THAT MOM WOULD HAVE LOVED

For some years now, I have meant to frame a square little black-and-white photo of my mother.

It rests against another framed photo by my bed, its sides slowly curling toward an eventual union. She is peering playfully around the corner at the top of a stairway, her right leg extended to show off a little calf under the poufy skirt. Her right arm stretches straight out, too, and she is holding her high-heeled party shoes in midair, a striking rebuff to the scruffy slippers on her feet.

It was 1958, and she was the twenty-one-year-old mother of one-year-old me. She is flirting with the man behind the camera—her husband, my father. He, too, was twenty-one.

This is my favorite photo of my mother, even though it sometimes makes me sad, especially in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. I flick on the light, and there she is. It is a perfect snapshot of where she came from and where she hoped to go, a tidy composition hiding a messy start.

On the night of this photo, I imagine my parents thinking that maybe everything was going to be all right. You don’t know from looking at the smile on my mother’s seamless face that their young marriage began with a doctor’s surprising news and an elopement in the middle of the night across state lines. You don’t know that the stairway doesn’t belong to them, but to the great-aunt who kindly took them in. And you don’t know that the girl in the picture hoped to be a nurse one day but never was.

All you know from that picture is what she wrote in her own loopy backhand on the back: “Chuck and I had just got home from Ma Schultz’s—Sun. eve.”

My mother always said her life was a good one. She raised four kids, loved four grandchildren, and told me a week before she died that she still got butterflies when my father walked into the room. But over the years, she gave up on her bigger self, the one who was going to go to night school to get a degree.

I still remember the night she surrendered. I was in high school when she enrolled in a typing class. She was so flustered after the first session that she drove up an exit ramp to the freeway.

“That’s it,” she told me later that night, her hands trembling as she wiped away tears. “I’m just not good enough.” And that was that. She worked as a nurse’s aide the rest of her life, in a hospital and then later for a hospice. She was only sixty-two when she died. More than eight hundred people attended her wake.

Nearly six years later, my father is slowly sifting through the cards and letters, the photos and Post-it notes that chronicle my mother’s daily life. A recent batch he mailed to me included a folded, handwritten list that began, “I AM SOMEBODY!”

The list continues: “I AM A HUMAN BEING . . . I AM AN IMPORTANT PERSON . . . GOD LOVES ME . . . I AM SOMEBODY!”

I imagine her tucking this into her purse, or slipping it into her Bible, someplace where she could easily find it and pull it out as a reminder of something we obviously failed to make clear. I stared at the list in my hand, then looked over at that photo of her, the one where she seems so full of her young and capable self.

“How?” I wondered aloud, shaking the list at her. “How could you not have known this?”

Sunday is Mother’s Day. I could rattle off a whole list of the gifts I bought her, the cards I mailed. But I can’t describe a single time when I sat my mother down on that special day and asked her even one question about her life. She would have loved that, and by showing an interest in her life I would have learned so much about my own.

A month after my mom died, my daughter asked me a question about my childhood while I was driving.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Grandma.”

My daughter stared at me as I slowed the car for a moment and sucked in air.

“Mom?” she said.

“I’m okay.”

“Mom?”

Only after my mother was gone did I realize how much of me she held captive in her memories. Now, whole parts of me are lost to her for good.

My mom was somebody.

Yes, she was.

---

Excerpted from Life Happens: And Other Unavoidable Truths by Connie Schultz
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.