Grace and Grit by Lilly Ledbetter

in 1976, so, too, was management philosophy; it was now emphasizing a team approach.
    I thought about the stories I heard growing up, the bloody tales of violence between union men and management. They were legendary, like the well-known local ghost stories. I remembered Aunt Robbie talking about her own uncle, who went into hiding during a strike to keep from being killed. My uncles had often referred to “the reign of terror,” the time before World War II when workers tried to unionize and labor organizers were beaten viciously on the main street in the middle of the day. According to the article, times had changed.
    I finished the article and held the magazine in my lap, considering, for the first time, the real possibility of working at Goodyear—the article had also said that women were becoming part of this new management team. I had no idea what went on behind those redbrick walls sprawling for acres next to the Coosa River. How a tire was actually made was beyond my comprehension. I thought about my friend Sandra wearing a different sweater set every day and the beach vacations and shiny Mercurys Goodyear provided her and her family. Maybe working at Goodyear could give me that stability I needed for the rest of my working life. I’d started late, entering the workforce when I was thirty-one, and I’d gone as far as I could at H&R Block without moving to another state.
    One of my most pressing concerns was college tuition now that Vickie was almost halfway through college at Jacksonville State University. Seeing both Vickie and Phillip successfully attend college was one of my greatest dreams, and I’d cashed out my retirement each time I’d made a job change to create a college savings plan.
    For a while, I’d been worried that Vickie was headed down thewrong path and wouldn’t even make it as the first person in our family to go to college. She’d been such a well-behaved young girl, but she’d started hanging with a rough crowd about the time she learned how to drive. Her teen years had certainly put a strain on Charles and me. She and her friends would do things like get one friend’s little dog drunk. Thank goodness, by the time she graduated from high school, she’d finally settled down. I couldn’t help but feel that my work-induced absence partly caused her rebellion. Maybe she’d been too responsible too young and wanted freedom from the burden of being such a good and helpful child. Now in her second year of college, she was serious about her studies, and too busy working part-time at the Dairy Dip (and as a receptionist at my office during tax season) to get into too much trouble. I wanted to make sure she would have whatever she needed to keep her life on track.
    As I approached forty-one, I was also beginning to realize that life was moving faster than I’d planned. There was only so much time left to accomplish what needed to get done—to establish a greater sense of security for my family. Phillip would be in college soon, and I still needed to build a good retirement. I felt I wouldn’t have many more chances left to achieve a certain degree of professional success. The youthful luxury of imagining I had all the time in the world to get it right was long gone. Facing the last half of my life, I understood how important the choices I made were.
    I’d also been taken off guard by Edna’s recent diagnosis of mouth cancer during the summer. Considering that my grandmother Lillie had died young from cancer, Edna was convinced she was also going to die. After the woman behind the Merle Norman counter told her they didn’t have any makeup to cover her sallow complexion, Edna liked to say, “Don’t worry about buying me anything—I won’t be living by the time Christmas comes.”
    In light of the fact that she’d had colon cancer ten years earlier, the diagnosis wasn’t surprising. She’d also dipped snuff and smokedall her life. She never understood why when we’d moved into our