Word: iras
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...journalism much earlier than whites do. Though some are lured away to more lucrative fields, many are frustrated by limited opportunities to move up. "People who have worked hard, been on the rewrite bank, done the police beat are not being promoted as fast as their white counterparts," charges Ira Hadnot, a vice president of the Institute for Journalism Education, a nonprofit agency that has helped train 400 minority journalists. Black men fare even worse than black women, says Ernie Schultz, president of the Radio- Television News Directors Association, in part because "white males feel threatened by them...
...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...
Much of Breathing Lessons takes place while Ira and Maggie are in their car. Driving with one's spouse is, of course, a leading cause of marital tension, especially if one of the party has just banged up the conveyance. Max's funeral provides an opportunity for the class of '56 to indulge its nostalgia. Serena insists on showing her wedding movies. Snatches of Moonglow, I Almost Lost My Mind and Unchained Melody are recalled. Sugar, the aging class beauty, sings Que Sera, Sera during the service and wonders if it was in good taste...