Phyllis Goodwin

I am not against progress. I want to make that clear at the outset, because people who write humor columns about modern life are frequently accused of being against progress, and I am not. I am against progress that requires a password. I am against progress that involves an app. I am against progress that has eliminated the possibility of speaking to a human being when something goes wrong, which is the only kind of progress that seems to be happening anymore. But progress itself, as a concept, I am fully in favor of. I would just like it to come with instructions.

I was a high school principal for twenty-two years in Columbus, Ohio. Before that I taught American history for nine years at the same school, Westerville North, which means I spent thirty-one years in the same building watching seventeen-year-olds try to figure out who they were, which is the most entertaining show in the world if you are paying attention and the most exhausting show in the world if you are responsible for making sure none of them burn the building down. Nobody burned the building down. I consider this my greatest professional achievement.

I was born in 1953 in Zanesville, Ohio, which is a town that people from Ohio have heard of and people from everywhere else have not. My father, Earl Goodwin, sold insurance for State Farm for thirty-four years and knew every family in town by name, which was useful for selling insurance and also useful for raising a daughter, because I could not do anything without my father hearing about it by dinner. My mother, Doris, was a homemaker who read the newspaper out loud at breakfast, including the letters to the editor, which she treated as a competitive sport. She would read someone’s letter, set the paper down, and say, “Well, that’s wrong,” and then explain why, in detail, to her children, who had not asked. I inherited this from her. The compulsion to respond to things that are wrong. It is a gift and a burden.

I went to Ohio State in 1971 because it was in-state and because my father told me he would pay for a state school or I could pay for anywhere else. I studied history and education. I met my husband, Don, in a required economics class that neither of us wanted to take. He was an accounting major from Lima, Ohio, who laughed at my jokes, which was the quality I was looking for in a partner and which has turned out to be the only quality that matters in fifty-two years of marriage.

Don retired from his accounting firm in 2013 and has spent the years since building things in the garage that we do not need and that I am not allowed to throw away. He built a birdhouse last month that is larger than our mailbox. We have had a conversation about the birdhouse. The conversation is ongoing.

We have two sons. Brian is an orthodontist in Cincinnati. Kevin is a high school history teacher in Columbus, which means the profession survived one generation of Goodwins and I find this deeply satisfying. I have four grandchildren who are attempting to teach me how to use my phone, which they approach with the weary patience of people teaching a foreign language to someone who does not believe the foreign country exists.

I started writing because I retired in 2015 and discovered that a woman who has spent thirty-one years talking to teenagers cannot simply stop talking. I wrote a column for our church newsletter. Then the local paper asked me to write one. Then a few things I wrote ended up online in places I did not put them, which is apparently how the internet works. Dale Parsons read something I wrote about self-checkout lanes and called me. He said, “I need someone who notices things.” I told him I had spent thirty-one years in a high school. I notice everything.

I write about modern life from the perspective of a seventy-three-year-old woman who has been alive long enough to remember when things were simpler, which they were, and long enough to know that simpler was not always better, which it was not. But it was simpler. I write about self-checkout lanes and passwords and the volume level in restaurants and the fact that my grandchildren communicate primarily in images and abbreviations that I do not understand and refuse to learn. I am not angry about any of this. I am bewildered by most of it and amused by the rest, and I have found that bewilderment, expressed clearly, is a form of humor that people over sixty recognize immediately because they are bewildered too, and nobody is saying it out loud.

I will say it out loud. Since you asked. Or even if you did not.