What's Next?

Wednesday night I drove to my daughter's home in Savannah with a heavy heart and a few tears. I had told myself no tears, but this task called for tears, for soul searching, for heartbreak, and for grief. We'd already been through the first stages of grief for Dixie, the elderly canine member of our family. Tonight she would actually leave us, and life would be changed forever. Dixie came to live with my husband and me in March 1998, when she was an 8-week-old puppy. Because of his chronic illness, my husband could no longer work outside the home, so Herbie--who for the previous decade had claimed he never wanted another dog--decided he needed a dog. In spite of my weak protests, he chose a puppy from the Humane Society, a part Australian Shepherd, part Golden Retriever sweetheart. She was honey-colored, with darker brown hair on her back, a slight merle on her right ear, and a light blond underbelly. In her later years, her muzzle turned white, giving her a distinguished e...

Each time I read another piece about why Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, was fired, my blood pressure rises. It is perfectly clear that she was fired because her second-in-command, Dean Baquet, wanted her job and knew how to play politics well enough to get it. Abramson may have inquired about her salary, which was somewhat less than her male predecessors, but that was not enough to get her fired. Abramson is 60 years old--right in my range. Like me, she grew up in the 1950s Betty Crocker culture where women wore housedresses and heels to clean and were always there when the kids came home from school. Husband and father came home to a martini and slippers while Betty got dinner on the table. But as Jill and I were coming of age, that culture shifted. Suddenly, on top of the Vietnam protests, we had a growing feminist movement that pushed women to get an education, get "the pill," and go to work in the same offices that had long been filled with WWII ...