Welcome to the blog’s new home! Some people build brick-and-mortar dream homes with the game-room basements and the just-right kitchens. I’m pretty sure I’ll never get around to that kind of thing.  So I’m going to call this site my custom home.

At least it’s better than the house author Amy Dickinson purchased in her memoir, The Mighty Queens of Freeville.

Dickinson is the woman who stepped up and took over when Chicago’s famed advice columnist, Ann Landers, died.  People ask her all the time how she learned to give good advice.

Funny, but I was just wondering the same thing. I, too, would like to be the person who knows exactly what to say in those sticky situations like when the girls at camp, in an attempt at humor, plaster their leader’s car with red-painted feminine hygiene products or when the lady with dementia keeps interrupting Relief Society

Of course, I could give great advice to my seventeen-year-old self. I am one of those fools who wishes to do high school over–at least a week of it–provided I get to take all my past-forty smarts back with me.  I am more than a little bit upset that it took me so long to gather all this wisdom. Wouldn’t it be nice to have been born knowing how to fend off everything from clunky bosses to inattentive store clerks?

Unfortunately, we have to learn all this stuff by doing it wrong.

Or we could take a shortcut and Ask Amy.

Her book is one long, entertaining explanation of how she gained her advice-columnist wisdom.

Dickinson grew up Freeville, in one of those blink-and-you-miss-it burgs in upstate New York.  Of all her family, she’s the one that had “fancy pant” ideas, going off to Georgetown University. There she found herself among students “stocked with options. When it was time to go home for a visit, they had a choice. This home or that? Beach or mountains, Florida or Maine?” All Dickinson had was the sad little dairy farm where she and her siblings took over the milking when their father abandoned both the family and the farm. For all their rising to the occasion, within a few months, they watched all fifty of their cows trudge onto a truck and go away to a farm that wasn’t as over-mortgaged as theirs.

After Georgetown, Amy married a boy from the Upper East Side. Let’s all stop for a moment and picture this man visiting his Freeville in-laws, he in his blazer and fedora, they surrounded by their deep snow and their trucks.

The marriage didn’t last.

Actually, divorce was a family tradition. All the women in Dickinson’s clan married men who left them. “My mother loved my marriage almost as much as I did. I think that she saw in it the possibility that a good marriage would affect the family’s relationship karma.” Sadly, not so.

At any rate, Dickinson took refuge back in Freeville, buying a home in which the screen door came off in her hand and the stair steps were so shallow, people found themselves riding down on their rumps.

Eventually, The Chicago Tribune called and Dickinson became their fount of wisdom.

So if it looks like your relatives plan to spend Thanksgiving snubbing each other, or if somebody you know is pregnant and shouldn’t be, ask Amy what to do.

Or you could ask me for advice.  Except you already know what kind of advice I hand out:  read good books, cook good food, like Ranch French Bread.