An Enduring Voice Ellen Goodman’s Writings Reflect The Ambiguity And Complexity Of This Era

Let 1995 go down as the year Ellen Goodman learned to play golf.

But don’t be confused about the symbolism. Think mid-life adjustment, not new conservatism.

“Just because I’ve taken up golf does not mean I’ll vote for Robert Dole,” she said, laughing during a recent telephone interview from her office at The Boston Globe.

At 54, Goodman has become an enduring voice of a generation at mid-life. The tone of her Pulitzer Prize-winning column, which appears in more than 440 newspapers, now reflects the ambiguity and complexity of not only her age, but also this era.

In 1979 when Goodman perched in blue jeans on the cover of her book “Close To Home,” a pair of glasses tucked on top of her long, blond hair, the world itself seemed a more cheerful place.

Today on her book jackets, she wears silk blouses and crowsfeet. Her grin has been replaced by a wise gaze. Ellen Goodman is older, more mature, a bit furrowed. Yet she’s as impassioned and opinionated as ever.

Just recently on the topic of welfare reform, she found herself talking back to the television screen. Where others saw lazy welfare recipients, Goodman saw young mothers torn between babies and minimum wage jobs at Burger King. She saw the sudden death of a long cultural debate about motherhood.

Soon she’d written another column, a eulogy. Congress, she wrote, has “arrived at a consensus as radical as it is unacknowledged. It’s a consensus that says: A mother’s place is in the work force.”

Count on Goodman to link the personal with the political. After all, The New York Times dubbed her “a voice for the women’s movement” in the 1970s. “I was a working mother in the days when people looked cross-eyed at us,” she said.

Despite her long link to feminism, Goodman doesn’t believe she speaks for any particular group.

“You can’t be a voice for anybody but yourself, really,” she said. “I write about what people are thinking about and (in the process) hopefully have clarified it. But I clarified it for myself, too. I’m certainly not somebody who delivers sermons from the mount.”

Goodman will be delivering a lecture, not a sermon, Tuesday evening at Gonzaga University, sponsored by Voices Contemporary Lecture Series in Portland.

She’ll talk about Americans’ growing sense of unease and loss of community in the ‘90s. She’ll describe the closed circle of politicians reacting to the polls and the rest of us reacting to their reactions.

“I don’t feel anybody in public life is really making sensible, thoughtful plans,” she said.

“There’s no long view of anything. If there were a long view, we’d be thinking of children. If there were a long view, corporations would be thinking about workers. Everything is as short as a quarterly statement.”

Goodman calls children “an icon of the future.” As such, they are the prime focus of concern today.

Because the issues that truly impact children’s lives loom so large and insolvable - how to improve the quality of their education, provide afterschool care, ensure they’ll have jobs one day - we fixate on smaller issues: a V-chip on the television set to block objectionable programming, for example.

“We drop back to the question of Calvin Klein jeans,” she said. “Which I hate. He’s a sleaze bag. But that’s not the same level of protection for kids as education and jobs.”

Goodman writes of social change, of the federal budget and the mad Unabomber. Of gathering mussels on the beach in Maine. Of all the public and private pieces of American life.

When Goodman began writing her column, there weren’t many other women writers on newspaper op-ed pages.

Now there are a collection. “I think it’s great,” she said. “You get a sense of how different everybody’s voices are out there.”

Two of her favorites are Mary McGrory, who was writing when Goodman arrived on the scene, and Molly Ivins, whose Texas impudence couldn’t be more different from Goodman’s own measured, metaphorical tone.

These days Goodman writes often on the passage through mid-life.

“It’s the maintenance stage when an extraordinary amount of energy is going to upkeep - keeping up the commitments you have,” she wrote in one column. “One morning inevitably looks a lot like the one before it.

“Most of us don’t want to throw everything over and go to live in Tahiti with the tennis pro. We don’t want to have a post-menopausal baby or a second career in brain surgery. So we have to figure out how to make the best of what we have.”

Goodman continues to take her own medicine: a prescription for “making small repairs and improvements so that the commitments of mid-life - the work that you do and people you love - don’t become a trap.”

She believes in “staying alive in your life” by endlessly reading, talking and paying attention to what people are saying in the supermarket.

“You can’t eat your seed corn intellectually,” she said. “You’ve got to constantly be getting new nourishment.”

She jokes that her generation is taking up golf in great numbers because “all the body parts have broken,” but she retains her image of herself as an athlete and continues to play her beloved racquet sports.

Balance, even now that her daughter is 27, married and living in Montana, remains elusive.

“I have more choices than many women in this economy,” she said. “It still is a daily struggle.”

She has written, “Like children who ask ‘Are we there yet?’ my husband and I often ask each other, ‘Are we on an even keel yet?”’

But the work remains compelling.

Says Goodman, “In general, it’s quite a luxury to make a living telling people what you think.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by A. Heitner

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Ellen Goodman’s lecture, “Value Judgments,” will be at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Gonzaga University’s Martin Centre. Tickets are $15 for general admission, $25 for patron seating, available through G&B Select-A-Seat at (800) 325-SEAT.