FEST Writing Group

Dr. Bowen:
So they get along okay.
Client:
I don’t think they’re great at investing money and taking care of themselves, but I think they’re okay. I mean, they have a house.
I think they make enough money and they live fairly simply, but I don’t know if they saved money.
Dr. Bowen:
Probably not.
Client:
I’d like to learn to be more…
Dr. Bowen:
More what?
Client:
I’d like to learn to save money. That’s another mythology. My family, my sister has always been, whereas, I was the beautiful genius, artistic, my sister has always been the one who could save money. That’s something that I’m working on.
Dr. Bowen:
You think you’re going to make any progress on it?
Client:
Well, I think…
Dr. Bowen:
All things being equal, it’d be a hell of a job for you. Worth a try though. See if you can save it. In other words, if she said, “I’m saving money,” and you were supposed to be the beautiful one. But it’s worth a try. See if you can save money. How you going to do that with your husband? Hide some in the cupboard somewhere?
Client:
My youngest brother, Jack, really wants to make money and he’s the only one who didn’t go to college. He went for a semester and dropped out. He’s the one who’s lived in Richmond all along, and he’s tried one thing after another. And he was trying to do real estate for a while and he couldn’t make it. And so, now he’s just working as a bellman at a hotel, but he makes more money than he’s made at other jobs. His wife is doing all right.
Dr. Bowen:
Okay. That’s interesting, Jack’s supposed to make a lot of money.
Client:
There’s a mythology in the family that, you see, I think I told you this before, in the branches of the family coming down, the businessmen were the other branches and we were schoolteachers, preachers, people who didn’t have money but were good-hearted. The story is that my grandfather, my mother’s father, couldn’t make money, because he gave too much credit. So he lost his stores because he gave too much credit.
And the same thing, story about my father’s father that he couldn’t make it, because he was too kind-hearted. So, it’s this problem of how’s Jack going to make it, because he’s such a good-hearted guy?
Dr. Bowen:
You know-
Client:
When he didn’t make it in real estate, he never talked to me about it. He built himself up about it, saying he was going to really make it. And then he never said anything when it fell through. And I didn’t say anything either, I figured I’d leave it to him to bring it up.
Dr. Bowen:
Well, all of these things cause you to think about them and remember, and if you remember them, they are emotionally charged. And the more you can take an emotionally charged point and put it back in the family in an innocuous way, the better.
Client:
Like what.
Dr. Bowen:
… anything, that’s beside the point.
Client:
Like what? I can’t think of it. I just can’t think of things.
Dr. Bowen:
You get yourself more differentiated, you’ll be able to think of them. Work on it. All I’d want to say is something about… Maybe someday he’s going to get that real estate job back. Some people make it in real estate, some don’t. Of course he had real estate hooked on to money.
Client:
In his mind.
Dr. Bowen:
And he’s working as a bellman in a hotel. You said making more money. That’s an interesting one. He makes more money at that, but who gives a damn how people make it, you know?
Dr. Bowen:
He chose it. He’s doing okay. (Long pause) You get so doggone serious with your family, you know.
Client:
What?
Dr. Bowen:
You get so darn serious with them. You can be more casual about it. You’re serious about taking your mother away on her trip. Your dad gets anxious about her going. You could just blurt out and say you’re going to take his wife away from him for a week or two.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Let him make it on his own. And him and his two sons make it together. Anything, don’t make any difference. Your family gets serious about these little old points. And I’d find a way to take the anxiety off the point and lay it back over there. You take the anxiety off by the way you talk about it. You pick up an anxiety issue and put it back by just objective talk, over and over.
Client:
Making a joke, or?
Dr. Bowen:
Well, a joke is on the objective side.
Client:
Doesn’t have to be a joke, though. Can just be casual.
Dr. Bowen:
Any, anything that is not uptight. Anxiety out of it.
Client:
That’s my problem. You hit it on the nose.
Dr. Bowen:
And tell your dad that, uh, you’ve been thinking about that, you decided you’re going to be a movie star in the next life.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
So he don’t have to worry about that.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Just worry about you in the next life. You’ll have to go get reborn again. I don’t give a damn what you say.
Client:
No, I use all these suggestions. They’re good. (laughs). I… I’m still s-, I, it’s very hard for me to think of them by myself. Um…
Dr. Bowen:
If you can get to the place that you don’t take things so darn seriously, you know? You took seriously that one about being the beautiful one, didn’t you? Why you take that so damn seriously?
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Good question to ask yourself, you know?
Client:
You mean why was it important to me?
Dr. Bowen:
Yeah.
Client:
Well, you know, I had it in my head that I wasn’t, I wasn’t worth anything if I wasn’t really beautiful.
Dr. Bowen:
Oh why’d you go from one end to the other?
Client:
Yeah.
Dr. Bowen:
Anyway, it’s worth working on, and your family. You know, when you first talked about your family, you talked about them as schizophrenic and all kinds of things. I ain’t heard no schizophrenia. They got their problems, but so does everybody else.
Dr. Bowen:
Well, like, you know, your notion about this family came from somewhere. And besides, if you come from a real undifferentiated family, so what? I don’t hear it.
Client:
What?
Dr. Bowen:
I don’t hear it. I hear them as just struggling with ordinary problems. You get like your mother. Make a big deal out of strokes. And my guess would be, maybe your dad’s hearing is gone, I don’t know. Has he had his hearing tested?
Client:
One ear is gone. He has a hearing aid for the other one.

Dr. Bowen:
How is that one gone? What got to it?
Client:
When he had a stroke.
Dr. Bowen:
Oh.
Client:
It just, in fact, I think that was the only thing, reason he knew he had a stroke, just all of a sudden he couldn’t hear.
Dr. Bowen:
Okay. I was thinking if it wasn’t just an ordinary hearing problem. These ENT people are able to do a hell of a lot to that these days. But if it’s a brain problem, it’s a brain problem. Maybe it’d be, be worth a workup at MCV or something like that. But he’s got, he’s got a hearing aid. Where’d he get the hearing aid? Did he get that through medicine, or where’d he get it?
Client:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, he’s pretty, he, he goes to see, you know, see a physician and he’s pretty good about-
Dr. Bowen:
Okay.
Client:
… I think. I assume he is.
Dr. Bowen:
Well, you start off with a notion he’s not very sick, you know.
Client:
What?
Dr. Bowen:
You started off today with a notion that he might be pretending to be sick.
Client:
For instance, he didn’t go to his mother’s funeral. Why?
Dr. Bowen:
Why didn’t he?
Client:
I know my mother was afraid he would have a stroke. Maybe he was afraid he would have a stroke, but he didn’t go.
Dr. Bowen:
Sounds crazy to me, assuming that something about (her) funeral would cause him to have a stroke. ‘Course your dad runs away from feeling situations like funerals.
Client:
Yeah. See, it’s paradoxical because on the surface, he see, he’s very, a very feeling person. He’ll cry easily, laugh easily. But he’ll also not go to a, a party, or something.
Dr. Bowen:
Because of what?
Client:
Because he… I don’t know why. He’ll say it’s his arthritis. He has arthritis, bursitis. He has all these things. He can pull out any number of these chronic things as a reason why he can’t go to a party, or he can’t visit Mary and Andy.
Dr. Bowen:
Yeah. He feels shy, that’s one thing.
Client:
He’s shy.
Dr. Bowen:
Yeah. When you’re around him you can take him by the hand and take him. Don’t let him back out.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
I would take him to funerals. Boy, he runs from those.
Client:
To take him to funerals?
Dr. Bowen:
Yeah.
Client:
(laughs). Like, which ones?
Dr. Bowen:
I don’t know. Take him by the hand and tell him he’s going with you. He’ll go with you.
Client:
(laughs). I, you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to take a trip with him to visit his brother and some family members of his.
Dr. Bowen:
I bet if you tell him that ahead of time he would like it.
Client:
What?

Dr. Bowen:
If you tell him that ahead of time, he will like it.
Client:
He won’t?
Dr. Bowen:
He will.
Client:
He will?
Dr. Bowen:
Tell him you decided to go with your mother this time. Sometime you’d like to take him. Go look up some family roots. So he will do a lot for you.
Client:
Yeah. He even said he would talk to, to me on the phone. But he tends not to. (laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Oh, I’d keep bugging him about that.
Client:
Then when I get him on the phone, what should I talk to him about?
Bowen:
Tell him here you are, what’s he got to say.
Client:
What?
Dr. Bowen:
You better have a hell of a lot to talk about, because he’ll be speechless.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Make up your speech ahead of time. Then if you run out, start reading the Bible.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Something like that. Anything, doesn’t matter. Just keep talking. As long as you’re talking.
Client:
How often do you think I should call him?
Dr. Bowen:
You be the judge of that. Make it more and more often. If you’ve been calling infrequently, if you increase a little bit, he’ll like that. How often do you call your mother?
Client:
Rarely. You see, this is the thing. I was calling them for a while, and then she seems to like it better when she calls me, because then she’s prepared.
Dr. Bowen:
How often will she call you?
Client:
Every couple months, maybe. At most.
Dr. Bowen:
Maybe you could increase that to once a month, and you put in part of, you initiate part of them.
Client:
Call her?
Dr. Bowen:
Yeah.
Client:
But I know she prefers to be the one to call, because then she’s, she’s ready for it. (laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Why don’t you get ready and call her.
Client:
She’ll, she’ll wait till my dad’s taking a nap. (laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
I’m listening to you.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
You can work that around to talk to your dad. Write him a letter and let him know what you’re going to do. Let him know you want to talk to him. For you, he’ll do it.
Client:
So I should be talking with both of them more.
Dr. Bowen:
Yeah.
Client:
What am I going to talk to them about?
Dr. Bowen:
I don’t know.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Call them up and tell them, “This is Jane Fonda.”
Client:
(laughs). All right. I think I’m catching on.
Dr. Bowen:
If you can be loose with them and you can get a broad view of it without getting emotionally reactive to ’em, boy, you’ve come a long way on that.
Client:
Okay. You think practice will help?
Dr. Bowen:
Yep.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Yep. Part of it has to do with getting an attitude which, in which you’re not critical, or you’re not building them up, objective attitude. If you can do that about (them) and not get caught up in all that stuff.
Client:
Okay.
Dr. Bowen:
And you can get caught up and have them proclaiming how great I am, or how terrible I am.:

Client:
But I don’t think they do that. They don’t build themselves up that much.
Dr. Bowen:
They would build you up, instead.
Client:
Yeah. Which makes me feel sick. (laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
I had a discussion a few months ago with a priest, and I was asking him how he would like to be the pope.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
How’d you like that joke?
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
It’s impossible. So every time you get built up, you get built into an impossible job.
Client:
Yeah.
Dr. Bowen:
You can never fulfill it.
Client:
Right. That’s right.
Dr. Bowen:
And if you’re supposed to live up to it, you can’t do it.
Client:
Let me just ask you something about my brother, Jack.

Dr. Bowen:
Okay.
Client:
He’s always throwing out these things about if you really think you can do it, you can do it. And then he’ll talk for, you know, a half hour about that.
Dr. Bowen:
Well, that’s part of his own philosophy, and what he’s doing with that is thinking makes it so.
Client:
Yeah. If you believe you can, you can. So he’s trying to build himself up so he can.
Dr. Bowen:
That’s what he’s trying to do.
Client:
And I feel locked into, yeah, you can do it, you can do it (laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Oh (Jack’s) probably going to die just an ordinary man.
Client:
(laughs). Right.
Dr. Bowen:
And never become great like he thinks he’s going to be.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Dammit, why do people have to build themselves up?
Client:
But don’t you think it’s natural to want to improve?
Dr. Bowen:
Yeah.
Client:
He, see, he and I are alike that way. He’s trying to do it through real estate, pop psychology. And I’m trying to do it by working with you. He and I are trying to do the same thing. (laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Trying to get beautiful like Jane Fonda.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Personally I wouldn’t want, I wouldn’t want to hold Jane Fonda as a model, anyway.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
But anyway. She gets to be your model. Sure, I mean, it’s, uh, to improve? Is that what it’s about, to improve, or to be successful? Be successful at what? But Lord, I think you’ve done a pretty good job of it. What’s your husband do? You’re both of you in that artistic world somehow, aren’t you?
Client:
Yeah, he, he has two jobs now. He’s working
. . .
Dr. Bowen:
Okay.
Client:
He really wants to direct, and he’s, he creates pieces, and he has gotten some recognition for his work. But it’s, it’s not the kind of field where people make a lot of money, usually.
Dr. Bowen:
How much do you get hooked into his success or failure? Do you get hooked into that whether he does well or not?
Client:
I guess I do.
Dr. Bowen:
My guess would be if you can be detached about how well he does, be better off if you can do it.
Client:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Bowen:
It’s hard to be married to somebody and not be aware of their success made by dollars or something else. But the more you can get yourself to the position that you don’t care much how he comes out, the better he’ll do. He’ll do that on his own.

You know you get interesting because you get so darn serious about all this stuff. If you were less serious about life, your family would be less serious about it, I’ll bet you. And somehow your parents got all caught up in having to be social successes and they want you and your brothers and sisters to be social successes, too. I’ll bet you. And if you just be you, wouldn’t you accomplish more?

Your mother got her doctorate. How’d she do that?
Client:
She went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, so she commuted. She was there half the week and she was with my dad in Richmond half the week.
Dr. Bowen:
Did you ever hear of Dumas Malone? He was a historian over at UVA, died just after Christmas. He was about 95 years old. He wrote about a six-volume set of biography of Jefferson, won a Pulitzer Prize.

So Malone has spent his lifetime working on a biography, of six volumes, my God. I priced those volumes and a six-volume set cost $150, but it is a classic in literature. The day before he died, his wife was there and they got in some exchange about money, and he made some comment about he was a great success alongside Mr. Jefferson, who died broke. Jefferson spent so much money on the government and his estate, and all that stuff, he didn’t have any money when he died.
Client:
Hmm.
Dr. Bowen:
But I thought that was striking that the day before Malone died, he said alongside Mr. Jefferson, he was a financial wizard. But anyway.
Client:
Well, I noticed that, you know, just walking down the street in this neighborhood, I feel bad that I don’t own a home in a, you know, more middle-class looking home. I mean, we rent an apartment, and I feel bad about it, and I don’t really know exactly why I feel bad about it. If I really want that, or if… I’m confused about it, because on the one hand my family has encouraged me to be the artist, but on the other hand, you know, I want a home like my mother (laughs) has a home. And I find myself comparing, I compare myself to her.
Dr. Bowen:
I don’t know what you do with that. I don’t know what you do with that.
Client:
I think I tend to undervalue money. I think it’s, I think it’s more important than I tend to… think it is. I mean, if I don’t have money I can’t visit my family.
Dr. Bowen:
When you get one of those things and you’ve got to make money, I don’t know whether that goes away or whether, I think it’s worth working on. I have a brother. His goal was to make a million dollars. Well, the bastard has.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
He’s got one daughter, and she’s going to get it all.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
When he dies.
Client:
Well, that’s my brother Jack’s mission, but I don’t think, I don’t know if he’s going to make it. The family doesn’t think he’s going to make it.
Dr. Bowen:
I remember I went to my 25th medical school reunion, and that’s what I call the Cadillac Reunion. There were only two cars that were not Cadillacs. One of them was a Pontiac as big as the Cadillac.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
And I went to Tennessee and borrowed my dad’s Chevrolet and drove to Memphis.

Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
I thought I’d just show them Chevrolet.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
That time I had an old Volvo that I drove to work. Sort of an old model on the beat-up side, let’s say that was, by that time it was seven years old, and I wished I’d could have gotten the old Volvo to Memphis.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Damn thing wouldn’t run that far.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
But if I could, could have gotten it down, I would have driven it right square.
Client:
(laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
So anyway, that was my orientation to it, that money’s not everything. But if you get an orientation which says money is everything, that is a hard one to get beyond.
Client:
I don’t think I have that orientation. But I think, you know, at a certain point, if a person doesn’t have any money, then money seems more important than it is, or more important than it would be to someone who had it.
Dr. Bowen:
Well, I don’t know what you do about that. It doesn’t make any difference how much money you have, you spend it all. And I see these kids start out with, I don’t see how they make it, and they do. Whatever amount you make, is that’s what you spend. Anyway, I don’t know what you do about that, but my guess would be, your family put a lot of emphasis on it.
Client:
Well, no. I think they didn’t put enough emphasis on money.
Dr. Bowen:
And they said that teaching life is the thing, ’cause teachers and preachers didn’t make much money.
Client:
Right. So they emphasized money’s not important and the important things are the freedom to move to a new place if you want to, to be able to make your own choices and do what you want to do, that’s the, that’s the main message (laughs) from my family is, every person should do what they want to do. (laughs).
Dr. Bowen:
Okay.
Client:
And they came out of families that, I guess, were somewhat controlling, the mothers especially. My father’s mother wanted him to go back to Dyersburg and work for the phone company, probably live with her. My mother’s mother was very, she was an activist, and I’m sure she was very controlling, too. She, she, she was a teetotaler and extremely religious.
Dr. Bowen:
Activist about what?
Client:
She’d make sure all the children were going to school, and make sure they had shoes, and she would go to the carnivals and push the tables over and stop all the gambling in town. She would work to get rid of liquor being sold in Dyersburg. She was very effective. There’s a mission now, a big mission she started.
Dr. Bowen:
That was who?
Client:
That was my mother’s mother.
Dr. Bowen:
Your mother’s mother. That’s sort of like Carrie Nation, isn’t it? Jump up the saloons.
Client:
That was another thing I was modeled on. I was supposed to be a social activist, (laughs) as well as a genius, an artist, and a movie star.
Dr. Bowen:
Okay. That social activism gets to be a thing. One of our trainees last fall, I guess, whenever it was, they had to do little old papers at their training meeting, and she did one about all of her activism against the nuclear bomb. And all I said about that is, “I’m not my brother’s keeper. I’m not going to tell anybody how they should try to live their lives. I’ll just try to live mine the way I want to live it. I ain’t going to get involved in telling others how to do it. Especially when you get to whether or not, you know there’s arguments on both sides of the nuclear bomb, and I’m not going to get into that damn thing. I don’t know enough.” Lot of issues like that. But Ortho is one that gets off on that, you know.
Speaker 2:
What?
Speaker 1:
American Orthopsychiatric. They’ve been doing that for years.
Speaker 2:
You mean, so you don’t know what side you’re on?
Speaker 1:
I know, but I’m not going out there and take a public side. I have never been against man going as far as he can go with his brain, in new discovery and development. And I would never be against the discovery of the atomic bomb. I think it’s worth more in all kinds of ways, and I don’t think mankind wants to wipe his other part of mankind off the earth, and I’m not afraid of a holocaust. I trust situations more than that. That’s where I stand. And I ain’t in favor of picketing anything.
Speaker 2:
(laughs).
Speaker 1:
I’m in favor of the other side. I’m not going to twist anybody’s arm about it. I’m going to let them be… and if people want to go picket, we used to have a social worker in Georgetown who was a picketer.
Speaker 2:
(laughs).
Speaker 1:
And I used to say, “How can you stand yourself? You’re not doing anything good for the community.”
Speaker 2:
(laughs).
Speaker 1:
Because she got down in all that crap that goes on down the White House, and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:
Let, let me ask you about something else, um. I have an uncle. This person, that’s my Uncle Lawson.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
He’s the one who has a schizophrenic son.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
I’m just wondering, what, if you have any suggestions about how I might relate to that family. I did one thing that seemed to help, which I, he’s separated from his wife, and my family has unanimously can’t stand his wife. So I sent a Christmas card to her, to the whole family, but I put her name first, then his name, and then the kids. And I got a nice response from the schizophrenic son, and I got a letter from Lawson. Um, so I think maybe that’s the right track.
Speaker 1:
That’s what I would do.
Speaker 2:
The more I can relate to her, I think, it’s, she’s really, they’re separated but they’re not divorced.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
And she’s more important. I think she’s still my aunt.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Anything you can do not to get involved in side-taking and can relate to both sides will help him more than him getting a therapist somewhere, I’ll swear.
New Speaker:
If you can loosen it up and be the channel through which that guy can relate to his family, then that’d be worth putting some extra effort into it.
Speaker 2:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Speaker 1:
And I would do that.
Speaker 2:
Is there anything in particular I should write to him about, do you think?
Speaker 1:
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have anything in mind. What you’re doing is just conveying an attitude that you don’t get caught up in all this (stuff).
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
What’s better and what’s best, worst. In other words, you don’t get caught up in that. And relate to him as one mature human being to another. I think your Christmas card was a good idea.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. I want to go and visit them. It’s been kind of hard. Suzanne hasn’t been able to see Joan. That’s the, his wife.
Speaker 1:
Who hasn’t been able to see her?
Speaker 2:
Suzanne, my sister, who lives in Bloomington now. They’ve made efforts to see her, but they haven’t been able to see her and they haven’t been able to see the schizophrenic son, but they have been able to see Lawson and his daughter and her children. So…
Speaker 1:
Well-
Speaker 2:
I wonder if it…
Speaker 1:
Has your sister made an effort to see her?
Speaker 2:
A little bit. Probably not a big effort.
Speaker 1:
My guess it’s a real superficial one.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Yeah. So I thought I’d go out and visit Suzanne at some point, and then-
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
… get a chance to spend some time with Lawson.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
I wonder how important it is to connect with people like cousins. They have a son, the one who ran away, who’s in Louisiana somewhere. He was the one who was on heroin for a while. And no one has any contact with him anymore. I mean, he’s in touch with his family every three years or so if he wants $100 loan or something like that.
Speaker 1:
My God.
Speaker 2:
And I’ve written to him, but I never get any response.
Speaker 1:
You have an address in Louisiana?
Speaker 2:
I did. I, I don’t know if I still have a recent address. But I could get it from Lawson.
Speaker 1:
So he knows the address?
Speaker 2:
Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:
I don’t know what you do about that. If he gets-
Speaker 2:
Is it worth, is it worth trying to-
Speaker 1:
It gets to be an exercise in futility to, um, keep writing letters and have them ditched.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So I don’t know what you do with that. When you approach a family, you’re going to run into a certain number of those, and I would put at least a little effort to stay in contact with him.
Speaker 2:
A little. So writing once a year, or something.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, something like that. Wonder how long or often Lawson writes him.
Speaker 2:
Once a year or less.
Speaker 1:
My God.
Speaker 2:
I mean, the, I know they don’t see each other for years at a time.
Speaker 1:
Well, that amounts to a certain amount of cut off, you know. It’s terribly hard to relate across a cutoff like that. Be as neutral as you can. Don’t be Mrs. High and Mighty, you know, for people that are feeling like worms. If that guy’s on drugs, he feels like a worm.
Speaker 2:
He may not even be on drugs anymore.
Speaker 1:
I’ll bet he’s not. Maybe he’s not. Maybe he is, what the hell? Keep writing to him. Stay in contact with him.
Speaker 2:
It’s, it’s been hard for me to decide how to wi-, how to decide which people to go and visit in the family.
Speaker 1:
Probably the ones that are most important in a family tree. In other words, if there’s somebody who’s a leader, I would spend more time with that, a leader who has the most information. In other words, they can influence that branch of the family more than an underling. So I’d relate to whoever’s in charge, and choose your people that way.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. ‘Cause I think Lawson’s wife is kind of in charge of that branch of the family.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:
To a degree.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
And she is still my aunt, wouldn’t you say?
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Even though they’re separated?
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
And I’ll bet she might appreciate hearing from you.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
And don’t get into who, taking sides in the divorce. Just relate to her as a person.
Speaker 1:
You know we got to go today.
Speaker 2:
Okay.