“Hello, you have reached the Crisis Center, may I help you?”

“I doubt if anyone can help me.”

“Well, I shall try my hardest and may I ask your name.”

“I’m called Maude.”

“May I call you Maude?”

“Hell yes, that’s all I hear all day long. It’s ‘Hey Maude, what’s for breakfast, lunch and/or supper? Hey Maude, did you slop the hogs yet? Hey Maude, it’s raining out and you still haven’t fixed that hole in the roof and I’m getting wet.’ ”

“I realize that you must be under a considerable amount of stress.”

“Stress – you can’t comprehend the meaning of the word. Every time I look out the window and view that five-story boulder precariously perched on the hill, and the rain that washes out the soil and causes it to tilt increasingly more towards this dilapidated trailer, I shudder.”

“Perhaps you could move the trailer “

“Yeah, move it to where the trailer is larger than the lot.”

“You know, there are times when I’m stressful — I just reflect upon the good times.”

“I doubt I can find any thing to be cheerful about. I feel as though I’m on a pirate ship and have reached the edge of the plank and thinking very seriously about taking that last step.”

“Before you take this action perhaps you should reflect upon your happy childhood.”

“I can’t say I had much time to be happy because we were moving six times a day. You have heard the expression ‘the other side of the tracks’? Well, we were so poor we lived on the tracks. Now, every time a train was scheduled we packed up our tent, which leaked all the time, and moved to the right of way.”

“Undoubtedly this moving had to make you feel insecure.”

“Not exactly, after a period of time you accept this as normal and the non movers as being abnormal. However, for that midnight express train, getting up and moving when the snow was four feet deep and the temperature below zero was depressing. I would get back to sleep and and have that recurring dream of a light beginning as the size of a pin point then becoming larger and larger and then a blinding flash. I contacted the Guinness book of world records to lay a claim as to the woman that had the most flashes in her life time.”

“Certainly you must have had some enjoyable happenings in school.”

“To this day I can hear the lyrics of a song that the students taunted me with and sang over and over again. ‘She is not on the right side nor on the wrong side. Hi diddle, diddle she lives in the middle’ and that verse followed me even to high school and eventually I dropped out.”

“Then what did you do?”

“My unlucky day, I was hired by a greasy spoon restaurant as a waitress. This is where I met my worthless husband. He thought I had money and I thought he had money. We were married by the justice of the peace and we gave him and the two witnesses an I.O.U. Which we put on the installment plan. Now the only time he talks to me, if he isn’t in a stupor, is ‘What’s for supper? or, Pass the salt.’ “

“Oh, there has to be some pleasurable moments in your relationship.”

“Yes, when he fell down and broke his leg. Naturally, I had to pay the doctor bill and continue paying for his liquor bill and his 3 packs of cigarettes a day. Plus his mother’s liquor bill and suffer her never ending rancor, once a day if I’m lucky, ‘Son, why did you marry that one, why, she doesn’t even know how to skin much less dress out a hog.’ ”

“Frankly, I tried my hardest to cheer you up from taking that final step, but you managed to depress me to the point that I realize that I’m a complete non achiever in this position. Now this adds up to the tenth job I have had this year, including the the other nine that I have been fired from or quit. I’m going to have to talk with my coworker and hopefully he will talk me out of my taking that final step off the gang plank.”