The other day it occurred to me that the best clue to my passions is what grabs me when I scroll through a magazine or newspaper.
For me, it’s advice columns. Especially Carolyn Hax.
When I’ve mentioned this to friends, I either get a “Oh my gosh, YES!” or “Who is that?” So for those in the latter category, let me just say: My new personal adviser.
I am so awed by her ability to plow through the stickiest of dilemmas and produce a simple answer that I find myself composing imaginary letters to her, to which she responds with ease.
“I am struck by your use of the word disgusting,” she might say in typical Hax-like fashion, and go on to intuit a story about how that single word has given her a clue to my true diabolical agenda.
Or she might comment, after some angry diatribe, that she is more struck by what I did NOT say than what I actually did.
“I guess that’s right!” I find myself saying, wishing that I too had noticed such an obvious omission.
This love of Hax goes back to a lifelong admiration for confident advice -givers who can produce simple answers to others’ complex problems.
An early memory is listening to a friend’s cockamamie idea for building a spaceship and telling her, when I was about five, “I wouldn’t advise it.”
My mother rolled her eyes and declared me “bossy.”
Once briefly, with my late husband Bob, I dived into newspaper advice-giving. He was a new stepparent, and we decided to turn the whole exasperating experience into profit by becoming syndicated advice-givers.
Either we did not have Hax’s acumen, or the market back in the ‘80s was not quite ready for our stunning wisdom.
Suffice it to say that after we persuaded the local paper to publish our column, a single reader sent in a laudatory note. The editor who intercepted it, sent it on framed and with his own note scrawled across the top: At last, the elusive fan.
Eventually, our newspaper advice-giving efforts died a natural death, about the same time as we took up Par 3 golf and needed to free up our Saturday afternoons.
We emerged from the experience with a single lingering simile, which I proudly remember penning myself: that stepparenting is “as difficult as walking uphill on your heels.”
Having otherwise failed at the art of the elegantly simple answer, I am thrilled now to have Hax to fall back on.
I am not brave enough to actually send her one of my letters, for fear the subjects of my angst might recognize themselves, but the whole exercise of fantasy-writing her seems to clarify the issue at hand and make it someone else’s problem.
A recent “Dear Carolyn” letter, for example, dealt with my struggle to construct a family picture gallery that would give equitable recognition to all the players in a complicated scenario involving a divorce, two widowhoods, and resulting grandchildren and pets, particularly when the photographic remnants were all shapes and sizes.
“I don’t want to leave anyone out. I don’t want it to be unwieldy. I have a very small space,” I wrote in my fantasy letter.
“I find it interesting,” said the fantasy Hax, “that you have not considered resizing them.”
“She has a point!” I declared, and immediately rushed off to the photo machine at Walgreens, where I solved the problem for under $5.
Another time, during the pandemic, I stewed over mask-wearing protocols as news reports ricocheted between COVID deniers and Anthony Fauci fans.
“I wish I could go with my own comfort level,” I fantasy-wrote her, “but I’m not sure what that is.”
“What if you just went with the CDC?” fantasy-wrote Hax. Voila! An easy answer.
And most recently I presented her with a succinct but angst-filled question about the wisdom of renting an out-of-state condo seven months hence to escape the winter weather. “What about variants?” I fantasy-asked. “What about airline travel?”
“What about trip insurance?” she fantasy-replied.
Looking at the cost of it, I’m not sure I agree. But in the happy event I buy it and don’t need it, at least I’ll have someone else to blame.
Thank you, Carolyn Hax.
Copyright 2021 Pat Snyder
