Order this writing in the collection book Revealing All Your Dirty Little Secrets available for only $1995 |
|
This appears in a pre-2010 issue
|
||
|
What to Do When You’re
Related to a Social Cripple
Fredrick Zydek
Expect next to nothing from them. Don’t look
for understanding, logic, sympathy, good works,
or questions about what is going on in your life.
About all they can usually talk about is their own
small world and how, by being gruff and mean-
spirited, they manage to keep their employers,
bosses, supervisors and directors in line. What
they do is at the center of the universe. Everything
else rotates around them and points in their direction.
I know one who was so sure her own two children
were keeping her from discovering the meaning
of life, she left them when they were two and four
in an attempt to find sexual satisfaction and upward
mobility. Fifty years later, she cannot understand
why they both need occasional psychological
counseling and don’t spend much more time with
her than they do with their dentists. To hear her
tell it, what she does as a clerk-typist in the secretary
pool in the Federal Building saves the planet two
or three times a week and none of the generals makes
a decision without running several top-secret bits
of information past her before they write them in stone.
She has a great niece who will soon turn a year old.
She hasn’t seen her yet because they named the child
after someone else and she suspects it was on purpose.