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Trudy
Grassmeade was bombarded by things that offended her. It started when she stopped for coffee. Washington, Jackson, Franklin. Slave owners all. What were they doing on our money?
Trudy carried
a great many fives. She could trust good
old “Honest Abe”. But even he had now
fallen under suspicion. She had recently
read what Lincoln had said of a former girlfriend, “I knew she was
called an 'old maid,' and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the
appellation; but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking
of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full
of fat to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth,
weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my
head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her
present bulk in less than thirty five or forty years…” As a former girlfriend herself (an experience
she enjoyed on many occasions including the present one), Trudy could tell that
Lincoln didn’t respect women. She would
have to look more closely into his record.
Maybe he didn’t deserve that big marble monument.
As Trudy walked down Thomas Jefferson (TJ)
Avenue she made a note to ask the Neighbors and Friends Association why they
named a street after the sexual harasser of underage girls. This street should be named after the victim,
Sally Hemings, not after someone who belonged on a register of sex
offenders. And then there was St. Anselm’s
church. She knew what was in there. Stained glass windows depicting Roman
soldiers walking cheerfully through the streets of Jerusalem on their way to
the Crucifixion. Roman soldiers! The Roman Empire was a military tyranny that
oppressed people for a thousand years and yet someone in that church thought it
was a good idea to put their likenesses in the stained glass windows. She could never go into a church that had
depictions of Roman soldiers in the windows.
The thought made her cringe. It
may have been two thousand years since the Romans burned the ancestral village,
but Trudy kept the memory green. Romans belonged in museums, not in church
windows.
And so it continued as she made her way
down TJ Avenue and up Poplar Street, getting angrier and angrier. There was the post office sporting an
American flag. So militaristic. All of that “rockets’ red glare and bombs
bursting in air”, stuff. Why couldn’t
the country’s flag convey something more positive? Maybe happy faces instead of stars, and
multi-colored stripes instead of boring red and white. There was that awful Porky’s Barbecue Pit,
which sold sugary drinks that would make children obese. And here up the street came that poor
exploited rooster Machiavelli, who had to work for chicken feed while H.C.
Clarke raked in who knew how much money because of Machiavelli’s efforts. This walk was like Trudy’s own personal march
to Calvary (minus the Romans of course).
Finally she reached the Del Boca Medical
Arts Center and the office of her therapist Dr. Humphrey Smothers.
“I am so angry
Doctor Smothers!” Trudy began.
“Oh, I know, I
know,” said the sympathetic Doctor Smothers, “shall we start where we left off
last time. You were telling me how angry
you were because Turner Classic Movies had the effrontery to run the movie “The
Littlest Rebel”, starring Shirley Temple.
Trudy began
spewing forth in a torrent all of the pent up outrage and anger of the previous
week, occasionally interrupted by Dr. Smothers interjecting a sympathetic,
“Tell me more,” or “I know, I know.”
While doing no
actual good Dr. Smothers, to his credit, was doing no actual harm. He was performing the same sort of service
that any friend would perform, he was being a good listener. In his case, of course, he was being very
well paid to listen.
Dr. Smothers
knew, that like many other people in Del Boca, Trudy Grassmeade actually
enjoyed being wedded to her grievances.
She found comfort, purpose and identity in her righteous
indignation. What Dr. Smothers longed to
say was, “Get a grip! Opinions are like
a**holes. Everyone has one. Yours are no more valid than anyone else’s
!” But then that would be killing the
goose that laid the golden egg. So
instead he said, “Oh, I know, I know.”
“So you see
Doctor Smothers,” said Trudy, “if I am ever to be happy and know peace everyone
else in the world is simply going to have to change!”
“Oh, I know, I
know,” said Doctor Smothers, nodding sagely, “but now I see our time is up.
Shall we continue next time from the same place?”
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