These Days
Lifestyle Columns
by Stephanie Gertler
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I began writing These Days in 1995. There was a blizzard, and I was working as Lifestyles Editor at a weekly newspaper (now defunct) in Greenwich, Connecticut. My three kids had a "snow day," and I was not only trapped at home, but had to fill the front page of my section. It would have been easy to fill the front page had I been able to get to the news room -- and also if I'd had a computer and email. In those days, neither of those scenarios were in place, and the roads were impassable.
And so, as the kids were running around the house in their pajamas (they were 8, 10, and 12 at the time), fighting over which television show to watch, insisting that I bake three different kinds of cookies, teaching our four dogs to cha cha (my daughter was the one who was doing that routine), and I was slowly losing my mind as huge, lacy snowflakes tumbled from the sky and stuck, I wrote a piece about that day for the front page. I faxed it up to the news room. If memory serves me correctly, the column was called Pizza Wars.
I think I received about 25 letters from men and women -- wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, grandparents -- who felt as I did that day when I didn't quite know whether to laugh or cry.
And so the column was born.
Now the column runs the last Monday of each month in two Connecticut newspapers, The Advocate and The Greenwich Time. Written with complete honesty, it remains as it did in 1995 -- about life "these days" as we all find our way through love, marriage, friendship, family, raising children, working . . . just muddling through.
These Days Lifestyle Columns
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