never have your dog stuffed and other things i've learned, alan alda
"Back in New Jersey with our daughters, around the time M*A*S*H went on the air. From the time they were little, Arlene and I would often conduct family conferences around a picnic table like this. Everyone would get to challenge our decisions and argue her case. Then there would usually be an explanation from us that we were not a democracy. But listening, I think, made us enlightened despots."
-photo caption
"Ideas were an escape and defense, and I holed up in my room, reading for six or eight hours at a time. My mother had never seen anyone do this before, and she became alarmed. She began looking into the books, trying to figure out what mysterious forces were taking over her son's mind. There was one in particular that worried her: a book on sociology that was popular at the time by David Riesman called The Lonely Crowd. She read a chapter and became disturbed. She called the college to find out if they had actually assigned this disgusting reading material. 'What about this word that keeps appearing in here?' she wanted to know. 'Peer groups.'
Although she didn't say it aloud, 'peer groups' sounded to her like people peering at one another."(p. 56)
"Now, in my memory, I'm in the vault again and I lift the lid, but this time I see what's in the box in a way I couldn't see it then. Then I could see only the artifacts of a damaged mind. Now I see that as damaged as she was, there were things she treasured. And the person who is still somewhere deep in my brain, the remains of the woman who was my mother, can move me now by what she chose to keep deep down in her own vault.
The box was nearly empty; there were just a few simple things that an eight-year-old might keep in her special drawer. A bracelet. A letter. And at the bottom, an old photograph: a picture of me when I was a boy.
In her childish handwriting, on the scalloped edge of the picture, it sad: 'My beloved Allie.'" (p. 174)
-photo caption
"Ideas were an escape and defense, and I holed up in my room, reading for six or eight hours at a time. My mother had never seen anyone do this before, and she became alarmed. She began looking into the books, trying to figure out what mysterious forces were taking over her son's mind. There was one in particular that worried her: a book on sociology that was popular at the time by David Riesman called The Lonely Crowd. She read a chapter and became disturbed. She called the college to find out if they had actually assigned this disgusting reading material. 'What about this word that keeps appearing in here?' she wanted to know. 'Peer groups.'
Although she didn't say it aloud, 'peer groups' sounded to her like people peering at one another."(p. 56)
"Now, in my memory, I'm in the vault again and I lift the lid, but this time I see what's in the box in a way I couldn't see it then. Then I could see only the artifacts of a damaged mind. Now I see that as damaged as she was, there were things she treasured. And the person who is still somewhere deep in my brain, the remains of the woman who was my mother, can move me now by what she chose to keep deep down in her own vault.
The box was nearly empty; there were just a few simple things that an eight-year-old might keep in her special drawer. A bracelet. A letter. And at the bottom, an old photograph: a picture of me when I was a boy.
In her childish handwriting, on the scalloped edge of the picture, it sad: 'My beloved Allie.'" (p. 174)