I Thought He Was a Speed Bump: and Other Excuses from Life in the Fast Lane - Softcover

Marotta, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0963860305 ISBN 13: 9780963860309

Publisher: Ravenscroft Pr, 1994

Synopsis

"Most people in this country hurry too much. I know, because I have been one of them. For much of my adult life, I've broken dozens of glasses and plates each year while whipping them into and out of the dishwasher, thinking all the while 'Get it done, get it done.'"

So begins this collection of reader-favorite columns, with its varied chapter headings ("Latin For the Not Yet Dead," "Bum Bum!" and "When Will Dad Become a Woman?") all centered around the theme of slowing down in a world where we "drive" so fast we hardly know what - or in the story which gives the book it title - who, we are driving over.

About this title

About the Author:

For more than two decades, Terry Marotta has been writing a weekly column that now appears in papers all over the country. Born in Boston, raised in Lowell 20 miles to the north, she graduated from Smith College, then taught high school in the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, where she says she was permanently changed by contact with the frank and intelligent questions of the adolescents she met there.

After having some babies and putting in thousands of hours laundering and folding teensy jumpsuits, it came to her that what she'd REALLY always wanted to do was write a newspaper column. This idea came to her when the babies were napping, as she leafed through her high school yearbook and saw what her sweet, brooch-wearing English teacher had once penned there. "I hope you do write that column," the lady had said; so Terry sat down and wrote one then and there and has been doing the same thing every week ever since, come fire or funeral or the onset of labor. Back in NASA's glory days, she got clear to the finals in the competition designed to send a journalist up in the Shuttle, and though that initiative sleeps yet in bureaucratic mothballs, she still considers herself to be in training for the job.

Besides producing the column and writing books, Marotta has also done pieces for Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul, Woman's Day, and Parents. She also does commentaries for Public Radio and today lives just eight miles north of Boston with her family in a house that looks like a big old ship run aground that is slowly, peacefully covering itself over in a Sleeping-Beauty's-castle tangle of ivy.

From Publishers Weekly:

Self-syndicated newspaper columnist Marotta, who has written for Woman's Day and Parents , here offers some 50 of her brief and gently humorous columns written over 10 years. Exploring the vagaries and vicissitudes of middle-class family life, Marotta writes breezily readable prose. She can wring a column out of the battle to fight her penchant for cleaning, out of Christmas cards that boast of their senders' good fortune and out of the fun she finds in daily encounters. We meet her children--"two long-legged fawns and a little squat gnome"--and learn how they grow up. Surely readers will identify with children who mangle Christmas songs into lines like "Round John Virgin" and convert the Lord's Prayer into "Harold be thy name." Occasionally, Marotta reveals a bit more edge to her wit, declaring that the Latinate phrase "Ibid." means "boy am I sick of writing this paper," and likening the issue of young children's grasp of sex to the old Watergate question: "What Do They Know and When Did They Know It." This is mostly enjoyable fluff. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ravenscroft Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0963860305
• ISBN 13: 9780963860309
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176