Can one overscheduled, overburdened, toast-burning woman find true happiness in the warm embrace of a can-do personal assistant?
About a dozen years ago, I discovered what I wanted most in life. The lightning bolt struck from my television set. I was watching Woman of the Year, an old Hepburn-Tracy movie about a woman newspaper columnist who falls in love with a brash sportswriter. But I fell in love with that columnist's assistant, Gerald. He screened her calls, kept her calendar, carried her coat, drove her around the city, even listened in on her telephone interviews and took notes. She only lifted her manicured fingers to write her column and to accept the award for which the film is named. I wanted my own Gerald. I wanted to, when the Spanish ambassador phoned, call out, "Gerald, get on the line and take down every word!"

That was when I was single. I need a Gerald now even more. I'm married with one child (eight) and two stepchildren (16 and 19). My husband and I both work. My daughter is on a basketball team, takes guitar lessons and jazz dance, participates in chess club and robotics class. We have a house in Vermont that's half dismantled by renovation. We have a house in Hamilton, Texas, that's been under contract for a number of months. We have a town house near Austin, where we live during the school year because I'm getting a graduate degree nearby. In other words, I live the typical, overscheduled, hard-to-manage American life. My brain is so overstuffed with the undone, I've been known to prepay for gas and drive off without pumping.