I Thought He Was a Speed Bump: . And Other Excuses from Life in the Fast Lane

"Most people in this country hurry too much. I know, because I have been one of them. For much of my adult life, I've broken dozens of glasses and plates each year while whipping them into and out of the dishwasher, thinking all the while 'Get it done, get it done.'"

So begins this collection of reader-favorite columns, with its varied chapter headings ("Latin For the Not Yet Dead," "Bum Bum!" and "When Will Dad Become a Woman?") all centered around the theme of slowing down in a world where we "drive" so fast we hardly know what - or in the story which gives the book it title - who, we are driving over.

For more than two decades, Terry Marotta has been writing a weekly column that now appears in papers all over the country. Born in Boston, raised in Lowell 20 miles to the north, she graduated from Smith College, then taught high school in the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, where she says she was permanently changed by contact with the frank and intelligent questions of the adolescents she met there.

After having some babies and putting in thousands of hours laundering and folding teensy jumpsuits, it came to her that what she'd REALLY always wanted to do was write a newspaper column. This idea came to her when the babies were napping, as she leafed through her high school yearbook and saw what her sweet, brooch-wearing English teacher had once penned there. "I hope you do write that column," the lady had said; so Terry sat down and wrote one then and there and has been doing the same thing every week ever since, come fire or funeral or the onset of labor. Back in NASA's glory days, she got clear to the finals in the competition designed to send a journalist up in the Shuttle, and though that initiative sleeps yet in bureaucratic mothballs, she still considers herself to be in training for the job.

Besides producing the column and writing books, Marotta has also done pieces for Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul, Woman's Day, and Parents. She also does commentaries for Public Radio and today lives just eight miles north of Boston with her family in a house that looks like a big old ship run aground that is slowly, peacefully covering itself over in a Sleeping-Beauty's-castle tangle of ivy.