Sorry to see this lady retire…
Ellen Goodman writes of letting go in her final column, Friday, January 1, 2010
There is something fitting about publishing my last column on the first day of a new year. January, after all, is named for the Roman god of beginnings and endings. He looked backward and forward at the same time. So, this morning, do I.
I wish I could find the right language to describe this rite of passage. Retirement, that swoon of a word, just won’t do. The Spanish translation, jubilación, is a bit over the top for my own mix of feelings.
The phrase that kept running through my head as I considered this next step was: “I’m letting myself go.” Yes, I can imagine the response if a tweet came across the screen announcing, “Ellen Goodman has let herself go.” I can see the illustration: out of shape, lazy, slovenly, the very worst things you can whisper about a woman of a certain age.
But I love the idea of reclaiming that phrase. After all, where will you go when you let yourself go? To let this question fill the free space between deadlines in my life has been quite liberating. It suggests the freedom that can fuel this journey.
Looking backward and forward. I belong to a generation that has transformed our culture. We’ve been the change agents for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights. Now, we find ourselves on the cutting edge of another huge social change. This time, it’s the longevity revolution. Ours is the first generation to collectively cross the demarcation line of senior citizenship with actuarial tables on our side.
“Senior citizen” is now a single demographic name tag that includes those who fought in World War II and those who were born in World War II. We don’t have a label yet to describe the early, active aging. But many of us are pausing to recalculate the purpose of a longer life. We are reinventing ourselves and society’s expectations, just as we have throughout our lives.
Looking backward and forward. I began writing my column when my daughter was 7, and I leave as my grandson turns 7. I began writing about Gerald Ford and end writing about Barack Obama. I began on a typewriter, transmitting columns on a Xerox Telecopier. Now I have a MacBook on my desk and an iPhone in my pocket.
I celebrated my lucky midlife marriage in these pages, sent my daughter to college, welcomed my grandchildren, said farewell to my mother. I upheld Thanksgiving traditions in this space and celebrated them with a family that evolved far beyond my grandparents’ idea of tradition. I wrote about values and pushed back against those who believe they own the patent on this word.
It has been a great gift to make a living trying to make sense out of the world around me. That is as much a disposition as an occupation.
Now, when people ask what are you going to do next, I am tempted to co-opt Susan Stamberg’s one-word answer when she left her anchor post at NPR: “Less.” I am more tempted to say, simply, “We’ll see.” After 46 years of deadlines, it is time to take in some oxygen, to breathe and consider.
At the risk of sounding like a politician one step ahead of the sheriff, I want to spend more time with my family and fulfill the fantasy of a summer on my porch in Maine. But of course writers write — even more than 750 words at a gulp — and former columnists can get involved in causes that require something more than a keyboard.
Looking forward and backward, it is never easy to know the right moment to step onto that next stage. At a farewell lunch — which I described as the “sheet cake lunch” — my editor and friend read aloud some vaguely familiar words by a columnist 30 years my junior.
“There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over — and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.
“It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out.”
It was an odd experience to hear, let alone heed, my younger self.
“The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well,” I wrote back then. “It’s hard to recognize that life isn’t a holding action, but a process. It’s hard to learn that we don’t leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along — quite gracefully.”
She knew then what I know much more intimately now. So, with her blessing, I will let myself go. And go for it
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From Kathleen Parker –
I confess to feeling only slightly more rational than “Misery’s” Kathy Bates.
I want to strap Ellen Goodman into a chair and make her keep writing columns.
Goodman, whose prose has graced newspaper pages for more than four decades, allegedly wrote her last column on Jan. 1 – a proper end to a new beginning.
I use “allegedly” in the hope that she was only kidding.
No one who has labored under the cudgel of relentless deadlines begrudges Goodman her hard-earned respite. Retirement seems too old a word for one so young in spirit. Too end-of-road when so much lies ahead for a woman much burdened with talent and wisdom.
Like many regular visitors to the nation’s op-ed pages, I’ve “known” Ellen Goodman most of my adult life. Hers was a friendly face on a page that primarily featured stern men during a time when women’s opinions were valued only insofar as they pertained to recipes and cleansers.
On matters worldly, women were deemed not up to snuff. Or, on the flip side, human concerns related to home and family – traditionally “women’s issues” – were considered relatively unimportant, unworthy of the “thinking” pages of higher (read: masculine) brows.
How things have changed, and not just a little bit because of the trailblazing work of one Ellen Goodman.
Ellen’s moment in American journalism happened to correspond with the movement that liberated women. It was, and is, profoundly odd that what freed women from the tyranny of low expectations and limited opportunity was viewed by so many as a “women’s movement” rather than a human rights imperative that also relieved men from the burden of manliness.
I say this with an involuntary smirk of irony, for I have found plenty to criticize in that so-called women’s movement – hence my book, “Save the Males” – and frequently have been at odds with Ellen. In countless newspapers, we have been paired as opposites on op-ed pages by editors who insist on a left and a right version of life.
I am also a fan of manliness – at least of the Judeo-Christian variety – and harbor great suspicion toward men who declare themselves “feminists.” Nothing quite invites despair as the sight of a 20-year-old usher bearing a lapel pin reading “Vagina Larry” at one of Eve Ensler’s annual soliloquies of self-worship, “The Vagina Diatribes.” I mean, “Monologues.”
Suffice to say, I do not confuse myself with the Kathy Bates of “Fried Green Tomatoes.”
Alas, life is not a matter of left and right, but of something in between, and this is where Ellen has spent most of her time. Instead of drawing lines in the sand, she crafted sand castles of wit and charm. Her gift was proffering poignancy without pique in a snark-free zone.
Even if one disagreed with her conclusions, Ellen offered reasoned arguments that often pierced the armor of our own defenses. She was a skillful wordsmith, yes, but more than that, she was a consummate columnist. It is not so hard to write a column for a few weeks or even a year. The trick is writing quality columns year after year. For decades, Ellen managed to draw readers in, take them for a spin through her thoughts, and leave them wishing the ride hadn’t ended so soon. That is called magic.
As a fellow columnist, I am indebted to Ellen for clearing some of journalism’s underbrush and marking the trail with good humor. As a woman, I’m grateful to her for helping us recognize women’s issues as universal concerns. As a human being, I’m sorry to see her cursor go dim.
Today, we accept the gifts of the women’s movement without much notice. We expect to see women in equal numbers to men in most endeavors, though I still would argue that the sexes are not always interchangeable.
We also expect to see women on the op-ed pages, though there are still fewer than men. Here is how far we’ve come: Sixteen years ago when I first became syndicated, editors would bark at the noble salesperson, “We don’t need Parker; we got Goodman.”
One woman was as good as another, in other words.
We know that just ain’t so, but we didn’t always. For this, we can thank Ellen Goodman, too.
Best of luck in your second act, Ellen. If I may be permitted one final burst of Batesian inspiration, break a leg.