Rutland, Vermont once was a railroad hub. When the railroad company folded, its station and yards, right downtown, became a shopping center, which somehow never quite took off. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart wanted to be in Vermont, over great opposition. Finally a compromise was reached: Most of the old shopping center would be replaced by a new Wal-Mart.

Now the obvious plus is that the city is collecting taxes. Another plus is that Wal-Mart is, I think, employing more people than the businesses it replaced -- and I doubt it is paying them any less. But what has been the effect on the adjacent old downtown?

About zero, I'd say. Before Wal-Mart came, the classy men's store had been driven out of business by discount stores and a general lack of interest in coats and ties, etc. The other stores have had their ups and downs. I had hoped the downtown Wal-Mart would revitalize the downtown, but at least last time I was there, it hadn't. It did pretty much kill the "old" shopping mall a mile or so down the road to Killington. But the real competition for downtown retail is that many stores find business is better in another section of the city, where the motels (and ski customers) are, and *that* commercial boom was caused by the opening of a highway that allows people who live west of Rutland to avoid having to go through downtown at all.

Just a data point. I don't live in Rutland, just visit from time to time for family reasons, and maybe someone who lives in mid-Vermont could fill me in. But I never thought Wal-Mart killed any downtowns other than the one or two-block rural downtowns where its coming may have been the last straw. Other, larger downtowns were hurt by the market forces and transportation improvements that have been going on for the last 50 years. The solution for these larger downtowns is to adapt, to focus more on food, drink, banks (for some reason) and offices, and the boutiques (and, for some reason, bookstores) that seem to fit into a more trendy ambiance.

To me, the key sentence in the letter was that Ms. Twentysomething was not enjoying Chicago. She felt uncomfortable. She doesn't seem to have been building a career there, just working to pay the rent. Nothing could be more awful for a young woman than to take some dead-end job in the city and live all alone in an apartment with no real friends.

My advice: Do go home. See what happens with the boy. If it's love, you'll want to follow him wherever he goes. But also, rekindle your friendships with other young women -- some, at least, will be between boyfriends or husbands. And with the young men, though there is no love interest. Give yourself a year, max, and plan to go back, either with the boy, or with a roommate from your home town.

It's a lot easier to feel comfortable going out and making new friends in a big city if you have someone to go with. And then, even if the roommate (or boyfriend) moves out of your life, you have a base of new friends with whom to build new relationships.

In another world, in another time, Harry Reid would be another Harry Truman. The parallels are almost eerie. I can't help liking him, and think he will make an excellent *majority* leader next January. Oh, he won't please the progressives all the time. But, notoriously, neither did Truman.

By Rafael Gumucio. Just a splendid memoir of growing up in the middle-class neighborhood of Santiago, Providencia (in those days the *only* middle-class neighborhood), and then having one's life torn apart by the Pinochet coup.

An absolutely charming book,though never translated into English -- still, Gumucio is a journalist, so his Spanish is accessible to anyone who learned the language in high school -- kind of like Phillipe Labro is in French.

Gumucio basically grew up knowing everyone who mattered among the leftists/liberals in Chile,in the 1960's. It really is worth reading even if you have to grab a Spanish-English dictionary to understand it.

It's attributed to Mark Twain, but so's everything:

To foreigners, all Americans are Yankees.

To southerners, anyone from the North is a Yankee

To northerners, a Yankee is anyone who lives in New England.

To New Englanders, a Yankee is someone from Vermont.

And to Vermonters, a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast.

Oz Childs

He was a wonderful person. Underneath his gruff exterior, he had a heart of gold. There was no sacrifice he wouldn't make for his family.

He used to say, "x", but you know what, his children listened, and said "y", and if you step back from how *you* feel about the issue, you realize that fathers can inspire their children not only to follow in their footsteps, but to really decide what they believe.

The LW's problem is not with the deceased, it is with himself (or herself). If you've gotten over how much you once hated his points of view, you can value them, even though you disagree. Without him, what *would* you believe?

The point of a eulogy is to bring the dead person back to life, and make the hearers who knew him or her recall the ways they connected to the deceased. I once gave (through my tears) a eulogy that left almost all my hearers in tears and laughter, remembering the special qualities of the deceased. To this day, I think it's the best speech I will ever give in my life.