Anna Quindlen

A slate roof is a humbling thing. The one we're putting on the old farmhouse is Pennsylvania blue black, and it's meant to last at least a hundred years. Jeff the roof guy showed us the copper nails he's using to hang it; they're supposed to last just as long.

When Rudy Giuliani was revving up his first successful mayoral run in 1992, his wife called. Not long before, I had trashed her husband's candidacy in print, but Donna Hanover hadn't called to carp.

Tuesday is a neglected middle child of a day. The weekend is not in sight; the work week is neither here nor there. "Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week"; "Monday, Monday." There are no songs about Tuesday.

One thing is certain: they would never have dared do this to a mother. The sad saga of Elian Gonazalez, a small boy turned into a political soap opera by people of dueling opinions who profess his best interests, has been full of double standards.

Spring break in Jamaica, and the patios of the waterfront bars are so packed that it seems the crowds of students must go tumbling into the aquamarine sea, still clutching their glasses.

This may sound strange coming from a life-long feminist, but I've had it with Women's History Month. It's hard for me to believe that Betty Friedan wrote "The Feminine Mystique," protesters trashed the Miss America Pageant and countless women hazarded class-action suits so that each March fourth graders could learn fun facts about Eleanor Roosevelt.

Here's a riddle: why was the internationally known Princeton professor stopped for driving too slowly on a street where the speed limit was 25 miles per hour?

The dilemma of the modern American voter is dramatized in the 1939 film in which a lion, a scarecrow, a tin man and Judy Garland follow a yellow brick road.

Dear Hillary,Love the hair. Like the house. All the best. Think you're nuts. Not nuts to move to New York, of course, which I consider the center of the universe (although you overshot the epicenter, the corner of 57th and Fifth, where I've asked that my ashes be scattered someday).

By the time you read this, John Rocker could well be volunteering at an AIDS hospice, or signing baseballs at a prison, or shaking hands with little kids at a shelter for battered women.

The Supreme Court was preparing to extend the evidentiary doctor-patient privilege to social workers practicing psychotherapy, and Justice Antonin Scalia was, as usual, dissenting. "Ask the average citizen: would your mental health be more significantly impaired by preventing you from seeing a psychotherapist, or by preventing you from getting advice from your mom," he wrote. "I have little doubt what the answer would be.

History is most often written in terms of inventions and events, revolutions and revolutionary ideas. But it is always essentially the story of people. The New Deal.

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think it's time to retire the chicken. You remember the chicken. It showed up most conspicuously in the 1992 presidential campaign, when a couple of Clinton guys in a bar decided to rent a chicken suit and trail George Bush the elder around, complaining that he was afraid to debate.

The saddest phrase I've read in a long time is this one: psychological autopsy. That's what the doctors call it when a kid kills himself and they go back over the plowed ground of his short life, and discover all the hidden markers that led to the rope, the blade, the gun.There's a plague on all our houses, and since it doesn't announce itself with lumps or spots or protest marches, it has gone unremarked in the quiet suburbs and busy cities where it has been laying waste.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to this column. I endorsed a presidential candidate. For those of you who have spent months looking at the television screen over a slice of pizza and saying, "I don't care if Kevin Costner is the Reform Party candidate, I'm voting for George W.," this may not seem remarkable.

In the beginning of this year a Gallup poll asked Americans about the three most important issues facing the country. As has happened so often in the past, guns were scarcely mentioned.

The Brooklyn Museum is closed on Tuesdays. So said the guard at the door. No wonder there were no lines, no protesters, no one handing out airsickness bags and copies of the Hail Mary.