Stupid Stupid Person

Most regrettable thing I ever wrote? Easy. Summer of ‘93, a column about self help meetings. It started this way:“Once, only old guys with thinning hair and pinstripe suits went to meetings,” it said in paragraph two. “Or fat ladies in hats. Or members of Alcoholics Anonymous.”I positively cringe now at the sight of this glib targeting. I mean Old guys with thinning hair? Fat ladies? People in recovery, for Heaven’s sake? Here’s how this gem of a column started:“You know the TV ad where the dressed-up woman says she’s too busy for a yeast infection? Well “What is she so busy WITH?” you might ask. Meetings of course! These days everyone goes to them. Pick up your local paper and turned to the community calenda,r as I am doing now.....”I then went on to list some actual meetings, adding my own supposedly humorous details: For the Mothers and Sons Group, for example I wrote, "Thursday night’s topic: “Should You Still Be Making His Bed” and “How About With Him Still In It?” For the Body Image Group: “This week’s theme: I'm Okay (But Your Head Is Growing.”) And for the Women in Menopause Group I had two topics: “There’s No Flash like a Hot Flash” and “Making Rage Work for You.” I even made light of people with compulsions, as when I had an OCD support Group taking on both the topics (1) “DID I Turn off the Stove? and (2) “Counting Cars”.But my real low point came when I got to the meeting of the Mild Head Injury Group, joking “What meeting?” “Is there a door to this room?” and, almost unbelievably “Duh.” Well THAT DID IT for one reader who having seen the column in her local paper, called the Editor to demand I be fired, and then sent a long denunciation of all my work to the Publisher. She called the piece “toxic tripe” and ridiculed especially the fact that I said “no offense intended” near the beginning: “It takes an irresponsible hypocrite to say ‘no offense’ before dishing out abuse about those suffering loss and crisis, and victims of crippling accidents.”She also she led by calling me "Jabba the Hutt in espadrilles" which really threw me. Still, as stung as I felt, I knew I had to sit down and write a letter of an apology, which I did. Then, "Case closed.” I told myself. “Move on.”Tick tick tick....Then three years passed and one day a letter appeared in my mailbox complimenting me on a column I'd done about Cosmo the fashion magazine. The letter was signed only with the writer’s initials but I recognized them; and the return address; and even the type-face.When I wrote back to say thanks for the kind words I added a spur-of-the-moment postscript: “I know this is you, M.” I said. “And I’m still sorry for what I did.”And then and there this stranger and I began walking down a new road together. I changed and she changed and we became friends.This story served as my column last week. I promised there to tell the rest of the tale in seven days so stop by again on October 11^th for the rest of the story as Paul Harvey used to say,

How You Know You're Nuts

You still have your 10^th grade term papers. You still have all the notes you and Ilona Wisniewski passed in 12^th grade English when you sat bored out of our skulls in that windowless classroom. You still have that fat candle with the three wicks that you can’t light anymore without having it drool  all over the place but how can you throw out a thing that came to you as a gift from such a dear of a human being whoever that was?  So maybe you're a hoarder and maybe that’s OK because they know what to do with hoarders these days. But you have compulsions too and they’re more of a nuisance.One Example: You just came across a pile of letters you received from readers in long-ago 2004 and your first thought was that you should sit right down and write to them all again. Even though you answered them back then. Another example: ten days ago you lost your diary and without the ability to write things down just so in that particular volume you haven’t been able to feel your feelings at all. Do you find it gratifying that the oil spill is in its 69th day? Hmmmm, a mystery. Are you happy your faraway friend died last Saturday and you never understood that he was dying so you never went to see him? You heard the sudden-stroke-after-surgery part but not the cancer-came-back-which is why they even had the surgery part.This news has knocked you clean  off your feet and you just can’t process it. Your psyche is a locked room whose only key is that little leather-bound diary left someplace dumb like in the Ladies Room at Target.Now here it is Sunday and you’re feeling a strong urge to visit the stationery store. Maybe you’re on the brink of buying a new diary and starting over, writing off as lost the last six months.  You HOPE you come home with some sort of journal, late as it in the year, because if you show up back here with notecards meant for once again writing all those readers from 2004, well we  might as well call in the Crazy Police right now.