Where will my shrink convene group session today?/ part 2

Where will my shrink convene group session today?/ part 2

fiction
edward w Pritchard

see part 1

When you go to group counseling sessions every week all year but Christmas and a two week July on holiday break while Dr. Fortner our fearless leader takes his screwed up family to Disney world, or Branson Missouri to hear Country music preformed by singers in drag; it can get  a little monotonous. Sometimes we meet in the tree house behind Fortner's house, sometimes we drive around and talk in the professor's, [only I call him that, me and Phil Logan, Phil doesn't come anymore to group, he was only doing group therapy to get out of jail early, he was only pretending to be crazy,] white van, but my absolute favorite place to hold our group session is when we get a hay wagon and do a long ride through the Country. Out in the country, far from the problems of the messed up City we live in, or the worse suburban blight that most of Dr. Fortner's patients call home, far out in the Country in a wagon or two pulled by very large brown farm horses we sit on piles of scratchy hay and watch the orange leaves on the trees drop from the vibrations caused by our hay wagon as we roll along and we smell fire smells that people who live in the Country use to roast animals that they shot with a bow and arrow or fry fish they caught with a bamboo pole in a farm pond.

We had our Halloween therapy session last Thursday. The best thing about the whole deal is that one of the patients, Mrs. Donaldson who is divorced dressed up like a little Amish woman. I never noticed how attractive Mrs. Donaldson was until she wore this little cream colored bonnet and a black Amish style dress that covered every inch of her except a little around the forearms and then a crescent moon shaped slit between her breasts so every time she moved or leaned forward, well you get the picture. The interesting thing was she totally immersed herself in her role as an Amish woman. Mrs. Donaldson, Cindy, has an IQ of about 160 and I remember one time she said in our group therapy that she did a lot of acting in college and she is quite remarkable when she wants to be. She was very shy, demur, spoke quietly and was totally attuned to the needs of everybody but herself. She sat beside me during our session there on the hay wagon last Thursday and I really enjoyed being around her and watching her. Every time it was her turn to talk about her self she would tell what it's like to be Amish and Divorced, only she would tell all the factual truth about her real life as a recently divorced woman only from an Amish perspective. It was an academy award performance. The only problem was the day before that I had lost my job selling water softener services door to door so I was kinda of hung up on my own problems. Even being dressed as a pirate, and sipping Napoleon brandy from a real flask I had snuck on the hay wagon didn't completely cheer me up.

Dr. Fortner dressed like a haywain from a picture by Bruegel as he drove the wagon and lead our group counseling session. He had a PA system rigged up so we could hear him over the noises of the horses and the Country roads. When we were out in Wayne County a real Amish buggy passed us. Really, they were going to Church or a horse auction or something. Mrs. Donaldson broke character for a minute and put her hands across her chest so they couldn't see her like that; at least I considered it breaking character, I am not sure what the other patients in our wagon thought.
end part 2