The morning was blustery and cold. Just two days past the New Year’s holiday, Phil sat behind the steering wheel of his Honda Accord warming the car while he played with the buttons on the radio. He’d already stowed the luggage in the trunk.
In the house, his wife Mary, his daughter Allison, and mother-in-law Martha gathered in the front hallway. They put on hats, coats, and scarves, checked themselves in the mirror, and made sure the plane tickets were in an obvious place.
Allison would be the first to leave. She would catch a flight to her dorm room in Tennessee, while her grandmother Martha would meet a friend at the airport for lunch before leaving on an afternoon flight to her condo on Florida’s Marco Island.
Phil thought of them all now as he adjusted the headset. Normally the hour-long trip with the three women in the car would inspire him to terror. All that yammering. There would be five different conversations going on at one time and no one listening. His temples throbbed just at the thought of it. Twice before he’d been so distracted that he missed his exits on the highway. But this was a new year and a new Phil. He had a secret weapon.
Allison it seems had listened to an Internet radio show called LOVE HANDLES and had been inspired to help her poor old Dad. Phil worked in advertising and was not a doctor, so he wasn’t sure of all Allison talked about, but he’d gotten the gist of it.
She’d learned that men’s and women’s brains are set up to handle information differently. Women are not so much multi-taskers as they are multi-trackers. Because they have up to 30 percent more neural connections between the left and right halves of their brain, they can talk and listen at the same time. They also have speech centers associated with just about every part of their brains and consequently talk four to six times more than a man. The rule is simple: if women think about it; they talk about it. On the other hand, Phil talks about only a tiny fraction of his thoughts, because his speech center is limited to the left or “logic side” of his brain. Sometimes when asked a question with an emotional component, Phil finds himself at a true loss for words. He is not being insensitive. He just doesn’t have a way to express it. Well, Allison took time over the holiday to explain this to her Mom and Grandmother.
As they got into the car, Mary and Allison both smiled at the sight of the wireless headset and clapped tightly over Phil’s ears. He would be driving to the airport in happy oblivion as he listened to Radio ESPN. But Martha, well she scowled. She wasn’t buying any of this from her slacker son-in-law.