Times are a little tough at our house right now. Neither of us makes a lot of money, but years of experience have taught us how to walk between the raindrops and make it from one month to the next with a fair amount of grace. I cook a lot at home, more when we're facing lean times. When I know that I have to keep us fed on not much money, I fall back on my grandmother's recipes. She taught me to cook.

When I was a kid, my twin brother and I spent long summer weeks and Christmas vacations with my mother's parents in the mountains of North Carolina. Rather than go hunting with my grandfather on frozen mornings, I found myself more and more in the kitchen with my grandmother, watching her making a lemon cheese pie with her soft hands.

My great-grandmother died when my grandmother was 11 years old. As the eldest daughter, she was expected to take on all of the housework while attending school. Throughout the Great Depression, she learned how to make a little food go a long way. Vegetables were cheap, so she cooked a lot of them, mostly only using small amounts of meat for seasoning. Roast beef was a twice-a-month luxury, but there was nothing she couldn't do with a chicken, every part of it. Nothing went to waste.

Now I understand that her food was sacred. I feel connected to my grandmother and to hundreds of years of family when I'm in my kitchen making country food. In the delicious smells is a long tale of victory over hard times, of conquering starvation—of not just surviving, but finding joy and pleasure in every meal of every day.

From grandmother I learned to take real satisfaction in feeding people. My grandmother would beam with pleasure over a heavily laden table and say, “Do you know what this would cost at the restaurant? ” I never knew what restaurant in particular she had in mind, but I knew that the question was totally not fair, because no restaurant anywhere can cook like a grandmother. But now, thanks to her guidance and years of practice, I can.

For nearly thirty years I did parent programs in all of the fifty states, and regardless of the community, there was always a shortage of fathers attending, usually by a 10:1 (mothersfathers) ratio. Maybe they were all tending to business, and they obviously didn't think school was any of their business.

The world is now flat. How's that for a sea change? As Thomas Friedman described it in his book The World Is Flat twenty-five years ago, the power structure of the world consisted of highs and lows. The countries with the power and knowledge were at the top of the mountains and the rest were down in the valleys. A handful of countries (the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan) ruled the world's economy because they monopolize (垄断)the information and power.

Then came the Internet. Suddenly the countries down in the valleys were connected to the information network and the work flow. These included India, Eastern Europe, South Korea, Brazil, and China. Don't believe it? Walk into a supermarket and pick up any ten toys, checking each for where it was made, My last count: China, ten out of ten. The world's workforce became “flattened”. No more disconnected valleys.

Since 2000, U.S. manufacturing has lost six million jobs, one-third of its workforce, most of them males. For the first time in history, women hold the majority of jobs in the U.S.

The only people who don't understand the sea change in business are the fathers and sons still clinging to the image of the male who doesn't need to play school—just play ball. It's been thirty years since that idea had any wings, but too many males are still trying to make it fly. Once the only thing that mattered for men was what they could get out of the ground with their hands. Now it's what they can get out of their heads that counts. And without classroom success, today's male faces an impossible challenge from both intelligent women on the home front and foreigners willing to do the same job for less while sitting in an office in Bangalore or Singapore.

When my father was celebrating a milestone birthday, I pulled together a surprise gift that he would never forget.

As he was approaching 60, I had a firm idea: What if I could get the memories people had of him, put each one into an envelope—60 in total—and have him open them, one by one, on his birthday? So I wrote an e-mail to family and friends, explaining my idea.

I sent the e-mail and waited. And then the replies started coming in and I was very, very surprised. There were so many memories, and they were all so lovely. They came from the '50s, '60s, '70s, from every decade between now and the day my dad was born. They came from my mother, my siblings, my grandma, my dad's friends from high school, his sister, my dad's first boss, a colleague at his first job, from people who hadn't seen my dad in 40 years, from people I myself hadn't even informed. They typed them and handwrote them. They mailed them and e-mailed them.

The night before Dad's birthday, my sister and 1 stayed up late, putting everything together with some envelopes.

The next morning, after breakfast and presents and cake, we gave the pile of envelopes to him. “Just one more thing for you,” we said.

It took him a long time to open them and read. Each one was a brief ticket to another time, a leap backward over years and decades. There was a lot of laughter and a few tears, too.

I was kind of sad when the project was over because it was great fun to collect these memories. It gave me a different picture of my dad.