Word: iras
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Maggie and Ira Moran, the middle-aged couple of Breathing Lessons, are not out to impress us with special interests or personalities. The pair represents that vast majority of Americans who live lives without life-styles. Both characters came of age during the postwar conservatism of the 1950s. After 20 years of depression and war, a future that promised a secure job, a steady mate and two children seemed more than enough. There were, of course, degrees of modest expectations. Maggie recalls the remarks of her childhood friend Serena, just before Serena married a boy named Max: "It's just...
...Ira wanted to be a physician but abandoned this ambition to take over his father's framing shop in Baltimore. Maggie gave up the chance to go to college to work at the nearby Silver Threads Nursing Home, where she remains a geriatric nursing assistant. He, quietly frustrated by knowing all there is to know about cutting 45 degrees angles in strips of wood, plays solitaire for relief. Maggie, the care giver, has found her niche propping the pillows and emptying the bedpans of the elderly. She is never bored...
Breathing Lessons, like all of Tyler's work, is about character. But it is also about marriage as fate and mystery, something that grows, for better or for worse, in flood and drought. As Tyler puts it, Ira and Maggie's union "was as steady as a tree; not even he could tell how wide and deep the roots went." If Tyler believes that men and women have different ways of feeling about family, she does not elaborate. Yet there are familiar responses: Ira is frequently bemused and annoyed by the behavior of his wife and children; Maggie is spurred...
...demonstrates this quality from the moment she fetches the old family Dodge from the body shop and immediately has a fender bender with a delivery truck. She had been distracted by the coming activities of the day: first, to drive with Ira 90 miles to Deer Lick, Pa., to attend the funeral of Serena's husband Max; second, and more important, to detour on the way home to try to persuade her estranged daughter-in-law Fiona to return to Baltimore with her baby...
...unopposed. Unlike the bride who returns wedding gifts when the marriage is called off, members of Congress keep what they are given, even when there is no real race. Upon retirement, a member elected before 1980 can keep this pot of money for his personal use -- a kind of IRA with no strings attached. So far, New York Democrat Stephen Solarz has piled up more than $800,000, as has Illinois Democrat Dan Rostenkowski; New Jersey Republican Matthew Rinaldo has $600,000. A law passed in 1979 allows members elected after that date to return unused campaign money...