Sesame Street started airing in 1969. It was aimed at little kids and their parents, but my high school friends and I watched it too, at least sometimes. I was not necessarily the intended audience for Jesse Jackson's "I am somebody" campaign, but I had the basic phrase taped to the inside of my HS locker.
Jesse Jackson ran for president twice, in 1984 and 1988, during the Reagan years. I remember a conversation in my grandmother's kitchen, with my grandmother saying that she didn't think Jackson should be president. I remarked that people were suggesting that he should be the "drug czar." My mother said she thought he would do a good job. It didn't happen. Probably nobody would actually have done a good job at that goofy post, part of the Reagans' (plural) useless drug policy.
Doing tax prep, I have also been thinking of my mother. My parents paid an accountant a lot of money to prepare their taxes, but they were required to fill in a workbook with any/all relevant information. I felt that they were doing most of the work, but they were never audited, so he must have copied the info into the right slots, at least. When my mother became too tired to do all the prep and turned it over to me, she said "you need to buy some yellow legal pads." This had been her go-to for doing all the lists and calculations before submitting the workbook. I told her that I would do all the listing and calculations on Open Office documents instead. I type much better than I write, for one thing. But as I was starting to work on my taxes this year, I wandered into what used to be Arthur's office without thinking, looking for a legal pad on a shelf. That bookshelf is gone. I looked around vaguely and didn't find a yellow legal pad anywhere else. Do I have (now Libre) office documents and spreadsheets to use? Yes, but I also am writing some things in a (white, spiral-bound) notebook. I misuse the title of Nancy Friday's 1977 book "My Mother, Myself" fairly often, but here I am again, doing it.
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