Flying Lessons

I don't look like the kind of woman you'd think would run away from home. But here I am in Huntsville, Alabama, wishing I could stamp my marriage license cancelled and go off somewhere and become somebody else - anybody except Elizabeth Holt Martin, boring, dowdy wife of Dr. Howard Martin.

This strange restlessness is partially why I drove a hundred and fifty miles and paid five hundred dollars to listen to a woman with three degrees and an overbite tell me how to cope with my life. Glenda Wiggs is her name, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., heavy on the B.S.

"Or-gan-ize." She stretches her words, either to lend weight and credibility or to work up a sweat so she won't freeze in this room where the air conditioner is turned up cold enough to kill hogs.

"You must keep lists," she says.

She sounds just like my husband. I could have stayed home and saved my money.

"Priori-tize!" Wiggs shouts.

I wonder where she's put resist the urge to stand in the aisle of Wal Mart in front of the Tampax display cursing your dried-up eggs? I did that last Tuesday and Howard asked if I wanted him to write a prescription for Prozac. He's a psychiatric, which says it all. He can spot a patient having an anxiety attack in a mall packed with a thousand shoppers, but he can't recognize a wife in mid-life crisis at Wal Mart - let alone a wife having an attack of lust in the bedroom.