{"product_id":"life-happens-isbn-9780812975680","title":"Life Happens","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You might spot someone you know in the stories here,” writes Connie. “Maybe 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 \u003cbr\u003edon’t 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharming, 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 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharming, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eConnie is married to Ohio’s popular congressman Sherrod Brown.I grew up thinking you had to hate what you did for a living.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You kids are going to college,” he’d say, over and over. “You kids are   going to be somebody.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was an order.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Your daddy’s over there,” she’d yell. “Wave real hard and maybe he’ll   see us.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I never waved at the plant again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well,” I said, “I thought I’d be a social worker.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He frowned, shook his head. “I know you, Connie. You’ll burn out.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He looked at my blank face and smiled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’re going to be working for a long time,” he said. “You’d better   pick something you really like to do.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    THIS FOUR-LETTER WORD IS A MALE LAND MINE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Men, I’m going to share with you a little tip that could change your   life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Women hate the f-word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What?” you always say. “What did I do? What did I say?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Learn from this story:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Now what did you do?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He shook his head, mumbled his wife’s name. “I don’t know what’s wrong   with her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What did you do?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He threw his hands up in disgust. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Again, I ask you, what did you do?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He sighed, avoided eye contact. (A dead giveaway.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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?’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Oh, no.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He shrugged his shoulders. “So, I said, ‘You—’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No, no.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “ ‘Look—’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No, no, no.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “ ‘Fine.’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There it is: the dreaded f-word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Fine? We look fine?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You give us Switzerland.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When you say, “You look fine,” and perform that little palms-up flip,   our creative minds kick into overdrive. We hear:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’ve seen Wide World of Bowling highlights more exciting than you in   that dress.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “(Yawn.) I’m sorry, were you talking to me?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Whoa, when did the back-fat thing happen?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    None of these will ever land you on the right side of the heart-shaped   tub.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It is to laugh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    (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.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Now, I know the next question: Well, if you don’t like the f-word, what   should we say?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So glad you asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You are hereby encouraged to use the m-f word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Here’s how it works:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She says, “How do I look?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You say, “You look mighty fine.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My work is done.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A GIFT THAT MOM WOULD HAVE LOVED\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For some years now, I have meant to frame a square little   black-and-white photo of my mother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The list continues: “I AM A HUMAN BEING . . . I AM AN IMPORTANT PERSON   . . . GOD LOVES ME . . . I AM SOMEBODY!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “How?” I wondered aloud, shaking the list at her. “How could you not   have known this?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A month after my mom died, my daughter asked me a question about my   childhood while I was driving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You know,” I said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Grandma.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My daughter stared at me as I slowed the car for a moment and sucked in   air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Mom?” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m okay.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Mom?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mom was somebody.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yes, she was.The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist on kids, dogs, politics, men, women, and how it all works, except when it doesn't;[quote]-Liz Smith;Author of...And His L","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300569436389,"sku":"NP9780812975680","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812975680.jpg?v=1767731426","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/life-happens-isbn-9780812975680","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}