Raising decent children is backbreaking, exhausting, thankless work. I’m glad I took the time to do it.

It was touch and go for a while, back when I was sitting on the front porch of my girlhood home, begging my parents to let me join the Girl Scouts.

I was browsing around eBay recently, marveling at the fact that old Life magazines are worth about 30 times their original purchase prices. The bidding for a 54-year-old issue of Life with Marlene Dietrich on the cover starts at $6.99.

It cost 20 cents in 1948.

When I was growing up, girls were warned –- mostly by their mothers, who knew about all kinds of dangerous practices –- not to sit on cold cement or cold ground…