Q. I'm thinking about getting married. What is the one best piece of advice you can give me?
A. ONE piece of advice—are you serious? There's about as much chance I can give you a single bit of advice as there is that my cat Mamie will be become brave.
Mamie is the scaredest little thing you ever saw, always has been, ever since I found her under the house right under the bedroom. My husband, Willie, who spent long hours in bed (He always said that was the secret to his success—12 hours a night, or day, as it were!) heard her crying and crying and said there was a dying bird under the house. So, of course, I crawled under there and found a tiny, starving, half-frozen little calico kitten that Willie said under no circumstances could we keep, but that we fed anyway and took with us to spend the night in Greenville and that Willie had named after his grandmamma by the time we got to Little Yazoo. We fed her steak scraps from Doe's that night and afterwards treated her like a princess, but no amount of attention and tenderness ever made Mamie brave. She had two litters of the most assertive, sociable kittens ever born in the Western world, but poor, sweet Mamie is still scared. But you asked me about marriage. Come to think of it, there's a message in there about marriage. What you GET is what you WILL HAVE. No amount of loving or anything else will ever change that. That's about as good as any advice I can think of—and only one piece, too! Maybe there's hope for dear little Mamie.
The Real Conundrum
Q. Democrat or Republican?
— Confused in Madison
A. Some of my best friends are Republicans, and they are really nice people, some of the nicest people I know. I'd trust my precious grandchildren—all five of them—with them for a day or so, and my Republican friends are so nice, they would take them. I frequently ask Republicans for advice on matters of money, but since mine are usually matters of no money, I hardly know what to do with what they tell me. I'd vote for a Republican in a New York minute for president of the Rotary Club or the Junior League or the country club, if I ever happened to be a member of such an organization. But to run my city or county, my state or nation? I'm a Yellow Dog Democrat, and I'd vote for an old yellow dog before I'd vote for a Republican! I just wish there were more Democratic candidates who didn't try to act like Republicans. Now, there's the real conundrum.
Ask the Mechanic
Q. How do I decide whom to vote for?
—Wondering on the West Side
A. Republican or Democrat, there are two sure-fire ways not to select your candidate. One is to base your vote on a candidate's paid commercial advertising on television or the radio. And the other is to base it on what one candidate says about his/her opponent. Neither source is trustworthy. Would you go to the Toyota salesman to find out about a Volvo? Would you, in fact, even go to a Toyota salesman (a walking paid commercial) to get the truth about a Toyota? Do you automatically believe the automobile commercials on television? I doubt it—not, at least, if you have any sense at all. When you want to get a new car, you go to the car itself. You get up close and look at it as carefully as you can, from as many angles as you can. You get in it and take a ride. You read about its record. How has this car actually performed in the past? Did it really do as well as its commercials said it would? You talk to others who have driven a car like this, whose judgment you trust. In the case of a used car, especially, you ask the trusted mechanic who has worked on such a vehicle. And then you compare this information with what you get in a similar way about other cars. And this is precisely the way you chose the person for whom you vote, too: You have to search for the truth from sources you can trust.
And that's the truth.
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