You Can Fire Your Secretary,

Everyone Who Deals With Teens Seems To Agree That The Most Important And Toughest Job Is Staying In Connection And Conversation ... Not Delivering A Lecture But Saying What We Think.

Every Thing, Even The So-called Timesaving Device And Energy-efficient Machine, Comes These Days With An Elaborate Set Of Instructions For Its Care And Feeding. Buying A Machine Has Become More And More Like Buying A Pet. ... We Are Time-crunched. Not Just By The Number Of Things We Have To Do, But The Number Of Things We Have. In The Late Twentieth Century, Things Have Become Our New Dependents.

We May Never Know Why Joe Ellis Fabricated A Heroic Past. But We Know That The Life He Embellished Has Deeply Diminished The Life He'd Earned.

I Suppose We Make Kids The Repository Of Our Highest Ideals Because Children Are Powerless. In That Way We Can Have Ideals And Ignore Them At The Same Time.

This Packrat Has Learned That What The Next Generation Will Value Most Is Not What We Owned, But The Evidence Of Who We Were And The Tales Of How We Loved. In The End, It's The Family Stories That Are Worth The Storage.