How to use this Page

My mom had a saying which she used often, especially when she was stressed about not having enough time to two jobs that were of equal importance: “One can’t dance at two weddings on the same afternoon of the same day.”

I sometimes feel like that. My dad told us another story which applies to me as well. He, as a doctor, had a nurse of whom he was very fond. He said she did everything he told her to do efficiently and in a timely manner. But if he made the mistake of telling her to do two things, she became so confused that she didn’t do any one of them correctly.

Right now I fell exactly like his nurse. I spend my time being pulled in two different directions in my literary life, one is to promote my memoir, Becoming Alice and the other is to continue writing my next work which is a fictional story, based on true events.

The bottom line is that I can’t find enough time for me to spend to do either one of them justice, especially the writing aspect. Once I get going on a project, I like to keep going. I don’t like being pulled back and forth. I know I must make a decision soon or I’ll drive myself crazy. I know exactly how dad’s nurse must have felt. I don’t want to get to the point where I won’t be able to do either one of those jobs as well as I think I could.

I still have Bosses, Leaders, and Power in my mind. How could I avoid thinking about it? Every day that I put CNN on for the latest news, I see the kind of Leadership, the kind of Boss, and the Use of Power that the Lybian leader, Ghadafi offers his people. This also effects the rest of the world actually. Just go and fill up your tank at any USA service station and you’ll see how his every move impacts all of us. Ghadafi is a tyrant, for sure, but what I want to know is how there are so many Lybians who support him, who fly his plane and tanks and kill their fellow citizens. Have they been so crippled by having their own ability to think taken away from them for many years that when they are finally given a chance to exert themselves, they are unable to do so? Is this the same kind of brainwashing that we had seen among Hitler’s “judend namely the German children, who cheered for him blindly? This is all very scary stuff, as far as I’m concerned.

But I’m also worried about the leadership of the countries in the rest of the world that stand by lamely and don’t use the power in their hands to stop the Hitlers and Ghadafis and Mubaraks and … and … and …

Is this also a problem on a much smaller scale? For example, how many parents dominate their children, how many husbands and wives dominate their spouses, how many siblings dominate one another, how many bosses dominate their employees to the point that they are unable to express their own free will? Not a small number, I would imagine. I think leadership qualities can be identified in childern as early a nursery school. Perhaps we should find a way for those who are being bossed around to learn early on how to deal with those who rule over other in negative ways.

I was at a cocktail party recently where there were many people who I did not know. We grabbed our glasses of wine off a tray being passed by a uniformed server and looked around at whoever was standing next to us. The usual questions about where one is from and how we might know the hosts came first. They were followed by questions about perhaps having a mutual acquaintance from your home town.

In my case, I did know some people who my companion also knew. I’d even gone to a 50th anniversary party for that couple. By coincidence my companion was invited to that affair but was unable to attend. We remarked how youthful and athletic this couple was. And then I was asked … out of the blue …, “How long have you been married?”

I thought the question was a bit out of order, much like being asked. “How old are you?” Regaining my composure, I answered my companion’s question. After digesting the rather large number of years that my marriage has survived, she said, “To the same person?”

I laughed. My marriage’s survival did not seem so unusual or strange to me, but to my companion, a woman at least a couple of decades younger than I, marriages don’t have much of a chance to surviving many years. This change in our culture is quite remarkable.

For my generation, divorce was unusual. Not that all those long-standing marriages were happy. Not by a long shot. But couples stayed together for economic reasons, for religious reasons, or for fear of being ostracized by their friends.

Today, men and women are equally able to take care of themselves. Our society has become much more secular, and many different aberrations of behavior have become, if not accepted, at least tolerated. It is easy to explain that today one’s chance of being divoced is at fifty-five per cent.

I must remember to tell the next person who asks, in the same breath, that I have been married many years and … would you believe? … to the same man.