My old OED goes thirty columns from Work the noun (“Something that is or was done”—first citation 977 A.D.) through the verb and its use in phrases—Work out, Work up—before it reaches Workability. The OED’s Supplement offers almost nine columns more, mostly discoveries of other early citations. The first use of Workaholic—“One who is addicted to work, or who voluntarily works excessively hard and unusually long hours”—is attributed to W. E. Oates, Pastoral Psychology, 16 October 1968. Question for 1993, true or false: “All great-grandparents were workaholics.” Oh, the 1968 coinage merely measures our distance from 1868. When the OED Supplement defines its new word, it cites: “The workaholic, as an addict is called, neglects his family, withdraws from social life, and loses interest in sex.” John Wells for one will not qualify. There were seven children; his work was at home, the blacksmith’s shop attached to the barn that attached to the house. Seven children and two adults worked together every day, never neglecting each other not because of moral resolve but because they could not avoid each other.

Nor did the family avoid public things: John Wells lived in service to a consuming passion—which was the politics of the Democratic Party. Or was his great passion loathing Republicans? His distaste for Republicans began with Lincoln and included his neighbors, for then as now New Hampshire was a Republican domain. Not that he loathed his neighborhood in general, only its politics: This Copperhead fought in the Civil War—Company F, 15th Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers—out of loyalty to his bailiwick. Apparently the Wells’s dinner table, every noon, was as loud with argument as a national convention. Although the men were all Democrats, they agreed about nothing except the probity and intelligence of the Republican party.

My mother was twenty when her grandfather John died. She knew him as an old veteran, proud and intensely political. When he died she was old enough to vote, and even allowed to—as her mother was not, until she was fifty years old. Today I receive a letter from my mother Lucy in Connecticut, eighty-nine years old a month from today in the house we moved to in 1936. The letter tells me that she made chicken soup the day before, and froze ten portions. Making chicken soup is not a trivial accomplishment on the corner of Ardmore and Greenway in 1992. Lucy’s mind is fine but her body is painful; arthritis hobbles her; spinal stenosis bends her over and makes it difficult for her to walk to the kitchen or the toilet, her two destinations. She cooks for herself—and for us when we visit once a month to gossip and do errands—in five-minute bursts. She must sit back in her recliner, after five minutes, for pain to recede and breath to return. For herself, she freezes meatloaf slices, portions of chicken, tripe. Yesterday—she writes me—she also finished two aprons, which she makes as presents or for the fancywork table at our South Danbury Church Fair. She tells me she’s almost done reading the large-type Amy Tan we brought her last month. Day before yesterday, she tells me, she wrote five letters, and maybe tomorrow she’ll answer the other four that she still owes …