Maggie Pill Mysteries

Faye I remember Christmas. I’d start thinking in late September about what each person in my family would like for a gift. Barb was always the easiest to buy for, because…books. She didn’t much care what kind as long as it was something she could learn from. And she could learn from mystery novels about motives and justice, from classics about life and integrity, or from Bill Bryson about just about anything. She honestly didn’t care what she was reading, as long as she was reading. Retta wasn’t hard to buy for either, but for a different reason. She told you what she wanted, in detail, with directions and a price range. Sometimes it was written down, just to be sure. That left Mom and Dad, who always said they didn’t want anything. That’s such an unsatisfactory answer to “What would you like for Christmas?” but it’s what we always got. Dad was funny because for some strange reason, the man who never shopped would go out late in November and buy himself new underwear, so...

Many of us start looking for the perfect gift around this time. (If you're one of those people who's had your shopping done since July 12th, I still love you.) There are lots of ways to go about finding things to make those around us happy, but I've been thinking of something you might not have considered. Why not give people the right to be different from you? Consider if you will how much stress--family, community, national, and international--would disappear if we didn't insist on being right. Football fans call rival teams terrible names, and their fans must be stupid if they cheer for them. Men and women make nasty jokes about the other gender's supposed weaknesses. Kids take note of the differences between them and conclude Not Like Me means bad. I don't think they come to that belief on their own. Internet philosophers speculate on the oddness--and therefore the wrongness--of this person or that group. People of different cultures are ...