Well, The Project is going as well – or as badly – as can be expected. I am making a little bit of progress on my approach to working with people from a company that I really do not like but that I am unable (as I’ve said before) to rid myself of completely. It’s been one unclear calamity after another for the past couple of weeks. There will be some pretty fancy invoicing going on here at the end of the month, but in the meantime, I keep thinking of one of my father’s aunts. She burned herself badly one day when her dress caught fire after she backed up into the stove in the kitchen of the house where she lived, alone, well into her nineties. My mother, of all people, who was perhaps the most unsentimental person I’ve yet to meet, took pity on her, and this aunt of my father’s came to live … with us. She regained her physical strength and lived several years past the century mark. But her mind was pretty much shot after the burning burner incident. There are a couple of things I recall about her. She used to wear several dresses at one time, some of them facing the right way, many of them backwards. And, prior to doing laps up and down the upstairs hallway, she used to put on her big black shoes on the wrong foot so that the toe part faced outward. And my father used to say, “God, Margaret, what you trying to do? Look like Charlie Chaplin?” So I channel his voice and my mother’s compassion for the terminally wounded with each and every silly e-mail that comes through. What, I ask myself, sometimes out loud, are you trying to do? Although it’s only the second week of the month and therefore way too early to predict how it will all turn out, I must say that so far my revamped approach is working out pretty well.
