The Lovely Chocolate Mob (2 page)

“How can I help you, Mr. Owen?” she asked. I paused for a moment, and said, “I think I’m supposed to tell you about myself, and you’re supposed to give me feedback; isn’t that how this works?”

“Well, yes,” Miss Planter replied. “But what I was really trying to get at was, what problem or problems are you concerned with? What problem would make you pick up a phone and call a complete stranger for help? That’s what I should have asked.”

I sat down in the chair in front of her desk, and, after a moment of stalling, said, “I think that I’m not a very happy man, Miss Planter. I think that I would like to try to remedy that.” I hoped she didn’t take offense at me calling her “Miss.” I looked at her for a little while, and she didn’t seem upset. She might like it; maybe it made her feel younger.

Miss Planter thought for a second, and asked, “Is there anything that’s making you unhappy? Have you gone through any life changes recently? A divorce, a death in the family, loss of funds, property, or job?” She looked to be a hard person to read, neither smiling nor frowning; she made with a good poker face.

“No, nothing like that,” I remarked. “I work a lot. I suppose you could say I’m married to my job. I have a little bit of money, and my job is fairly stable. I’m in financially better shape than most people in my neighborhood, or kids I grew up with, anyhow.”

At this moment I was able to read her, because she looked a little puzzled. “Well, as you know,” she said, “we will have five sessions as a minimum, and I thought if we could pinpoint the problem at the beginning, that this might give us a little more time to work on a possible solution. On the other hand, if we have to talk and discuss, which really amounts to digging through your life story, this might mean more sessions, which could prove to be more expensive. I’m not trying to be rid of you, Mr. Owen; I just wanted you to be aware of the costs, so you wouldn’t run into any financial hardships.”

I smiled and said, “Thanks for your concern, Miss Planter, but I have a little money set aside. I have been thinking about this for a long time, and I’ve prepared myself in this area adequately.”

Miss Planter, although she did not readily show it, seemed relieved. Now that the finances had been settled, and she had warned me that this could be expensive, she was cleared to go to work with no hurried schedule, at least not with me. Also, if I did drag these sessions out and put myself in a financial bind, she had told me, and had given me fair warning.

She picked up a pen and a clipboard with another form from her desk, leaned back in her chair, and said, “Shall we get started?”

Miss Karen Planter was the type of lady who wanted to start from the beginning, who wanted to know about my family, parents, siblings, surroundings, my growing up years. I paused and looked ashamed, saying, “Well, I don’t go around telling many people this but…” and looked to Miss Planter, who leaned forward to hear better, so I whispered, “I come from a two-parent home,” and waited, then grinned when she got the joke. She smiled and leaned back into her chair. “Funny, Mr. Owen. What were your parents like?”

“This might seem almost unusual,” I said, “but I had parents who loved each other, a working father and a stay-at-home mother, who made sure we kids didn’t get into too much trouble. That wasn’t rare when I was younger, but these days it might be uncommon.”

“What did your father do for a living?” Miss Planter asked, obviously wanting to know something about our socio-economic situation. “How did he support the family in a one-paycheck home?”

“Dad was an electrician,” I said with a bit of pride, “and a very good one, too; at least, he was always in demand. He wired houses and businesses, in both new and old homes, and was hardly ever without work. As a result, we were kept financially sound and comfortable. We weren’t rich, but on the other hand, we never missed a meal.”

“Can you describe your home? I mean, the size of your house?” she inquired.

These questions were easy. “Yes, I can. It was a one story, two-bedroom, pier and beam home, and at $12,000 a bit pricey for a house that size in its day. I think the reason it cost more than other homes on the block was because it was the ‘show house.’” Miss Planter looked puzzled, so I explained. “A ‘show house’ is the house the realtors use to display the homes in a new neighborhood to prospective buyers. They would bring buyers to a ‘show house’ to give them a good idea of the layouts of all the houses in the neighborhood. All the houses in the area had the same amount of square feet, the same sized bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms, etc.” Miss Planter nodded. Smart woman, she caught on quick. “Anyhow, our house had one and one half bathrooms, and it was maybe 1000 square feet, total. A one-story, with a front and back yard, it was a little more than a ‘starter’ home. A drainage ditch ran behind our backyard. When more siblings came into the family, Dad built onto the house, with two more bedrooms in the garage. We brothers had to share a lot, and later the biggest bedroom went to the oldest. When we grew up and began to leave home, one by one, there was more room for the rest.”

“Did your mother ever work?” Miss Planter asked. Women seemed interested in what other women did; I supposed that was normal.

“Yes,” I said. She worked before she met and married Dad, and then for a few years before the babies started arriving. This gave Mom and Dad a little breathing room, I think, to lay a financial foundation, so as to buy a home. That seemed to be what people did back then.”

“What do you mean?” Miss Planter asked. Maybe I had talked too much, and now was being asked to clarify my opinion.

“Back when I was a kid, parents got married and, for the most part, stayed married, and worked and saved so as to prepare a little nest, so the kids would have a place to stay. At least that’s how it was in our home. I know it didn’t happen everywhere, but that seemed to be the norm among the neighbors when I was growing up.”

Maybe I talked too much. Perhaps I’d better wait until she asked me questions before I freely gave any views. I hoped she didn’t think that I was sounding arrogant. I knew I could sound inappropriate to others at times with my opinions; on the other hand, I was paying for this.

“How many brothers and sisters did you have while growing up?” Miss Planter asked.

“I had two brothers and one sister. We had a big family but not a huge one. We weren’t rich, even though Dad worked continuously. We had all we needed, but not everything we wanted, which was probably a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t perfect; we were far from perfect. We had our miscommunications and misunderstandings, but overall, Mom and Dad did a good job raising us; they tried. Any time one of us screwed up it was because we deviated from the path that our folks had set or hoped for us. What was most important, I think, was the fact that they loved each other.”

I looked up in time to catch Miss Planter peering directly into my eyes as I finished speaking. She averted her gaze and went back to her writing. It was as though she had this “I don’t believe what I’m hearing” look on her face. She wrote a little on her clipboard, and said, “I see. Sounds to me like you had a stable home life. Did you know your place in the home?”

This question puzzled me. “My place? What do you mean?”

She said, “I mean, did you feel welcome at home; were you comfortable where you were; did you fare well as a child?”

I paused again here. “I guess you could say I fared well. I’m not really sure at times. I knew what my role was, which was to keep out of trouble and to find something productive to do, or else Mom would tell Dad that I wasn’t living up to my potential. If I didn’t do my chores, that would be a sure sign to Mom that I was a child in need of correction.”

Miss Planter wrote some more, and then asked, “What type of chores did you have in your family, Mr. Owen?”

“Let’s see,” I began, “there were different chores at different stages in growing up. For example, as a small child, I was expected to help Mom in the kitchen. This was really a means of Mom keeping an eye on me; I really wasn’t much of a help at all. I’d sometimes get a wash cloth and clean the dining room table and chairs, sweep the kitchen floor, and, if Mom handled the water, mop the floor, but that was only if she let me. At other times, I’d help to wash the dishes, but I think I only got in the way; Mom was the real worker when I was a toddler. Later I’d be following Daddy around on Saturdays, whenever he didn’t work. We all did that; I learned how to mow the yard by age 10, and soon found this was a trap, because after that it was an expected chore from then on. But it was something I could accomplish rather well, so I didn’t mind doing it, not too much, anyhow.”

“You didn’t mind helping out the family, as a child, then?” asked Miss Planter.

“No, not at all,” I replied. “Keeping the home running didn’t all fall on our young shoulders. Most of it went to our parents. The older we got, the more work we took on, but we were never overwhelmed.”

“What did you do for fun?” asked Miss Planter.

“I was always looking for something for fun, but mostly I read comic books and watched TV”

Miss Planter looked at me, as if she were trying to figure out a puzzle.

“Not very typical, I know,” I said. “Guess I was kind of a pre-nerd growing up. Sports wasn’t my thing; television and entertainment was. And our television was black and white, with an antenna on top of the set to catch the two major stations in the area. Lovely wasn’t a very big town then, and this was before UHF came along.” Miss Planter looked puzzled again, so I explained, “UHF stood for Ultra-High Frequency, a cheaper brand of television station. We didn’t even know the UHF stations existed until one day we got to playing around with dials on the TV and found them, but the reception wasn’t very good, although at night they did okay. They offered more entertainment, or more cartoons.”

Miss Planter was becoming easier to read, because she looked at me as though I had a hole in my head. So I gave her more information to ponder: “But my real interest was westerns.”

“Why westerns, Mr. Owen?” she asked.

“Westerns were morality plays with quick solutions. There were heroes and bad guys, with nothing in-between. You knew who the good guys were and who the bad fellers were. You had an idea who was going to get killed and who was going to get winged in a shoot-out. The good guy always won, because it was his series and he had to live to have another show the next week.” Miss Planter was tuned in, so I included more to interest her. “Oh yeah, there were girls on the shows, too. The good girl always got the good guy.”

That remark made Miss Planter smile. “What happened to the bad girl, Mr. Owen?” I suppose she said that to tease me a bit.

“Well, since shooting girls was against the code of the west, they usually boarded a stagecoach at the end of the show and rode off into the sunset, or back east where all the bad people came from.”

“Did you have a favorite Western?” she quizzed, probably trying to find out what type of hero I favored.

“Yes, I had several, but the one I liked best was “The Rifleman.”

“Why was that, Mr. Owen?” she said, not looking up from her scribbling.

“Because the Rifleman was a show about a father and a son who moved to a small town to start a ranch; it was them against the world. Every now and then the father would have to ride into town to help the sheriff shoot bad guys with his rifle, but that was about 10 minutes into the show, so you got to see plenty of family interaction. Lucas was the good father and Mark was the good son. And the music, oh, the music! Are you familiar with the music, Miss Planter?”

“No, I’m afraid I’m not.” She paused and looked up, re-grouping for her next set of questions. I thought she was reading from a list on the clipboard. “Did you get along well with your siblings?” she asked, getting back to the family. I had to think about that for a short while, this being a never-considered-before issue. “Yes, we got along. We were different. We didn’t all develop the same in the same areas, but overall we cared about each other. We had our fights and disagreements, but hopefully by now we’ve grown out of that.” I chuckled when I said that. Miss Planter did not.

“How did you perform in school?” she asked.

“I was interested in learning as long as a subject held my attention, but later when I figured out that the teacher or teachers had ‘favorites,’ I kind of lost interest. I did okay in some early school classes, and not okay in others. It depended on how well the teacher and I got along; if I liked her, I did great; if I didn’t, I didn’t. I shouldn’t have let any teachers’ feelings toward me interfere with my learning, but I was a child.”

“Did you have a favorite teacher, Mr. Owen?” she asked, looking up to see my reaction.

“Yes, I did. My third-grade teacher was a young lady named Miss Plummer, and she never spanked me. That’s how I knew she liked me. I once made straight A’s in her class, which for me was almost miraculous. She was looking right at me when I opened that report card, and I could see her smiling when I discovered my fortune for that six weeks. She was so nice to me.”

“Did things stay good for you in early education?” Miss Planter continued.

“No, the next year I got stuck with some lady who didn’t want to be teaching but had to in order to get her husband through medical school; I made my first ‘D’ that year.”

“Do you blame her for that ‘D’?” she asked.

“I blame her for not liking me; I don’t think she went out of her way to help me learn anything, plus, if you were a teacher and you didn’t like a kid, would you grade him higher?” Miss Planter looked stumped for a moment, then said, “I’m not so sure I’d like being a teacher, either, if I didn’t have to be.”

I replied, “Well, you don’t have to! But she thought she did, and felt trapped. I think she took some of it out on us kids. I had to take that ‘D’ home to show my parents.”

“Are your parents still living?” she asked. This question stung, but I tried not to show it.

“No,” I replied. Dad died about 20 years ago, Mom departed about 15 years later. I’m the only one left at home.”