Hitting a nerve? Sept. 6, 2012

  

Obviously, I didn’t listen to my own advice about laying low when I left her a voice message asking her about some aspect of a public meeting that took place in one of her towns.

I followed up with an email making the same request.

A short time later I received a deluge of calls, first on the company phone and then on my cell phone, which I could not answer at first because I was doing a phone interview.

I broke away briefly asking if I could call her back. She said there was no need and had a one sentence answer, which she also sent me via email I later discovered, and which she elaborated on in several texts after that.

She was clearly upset about something I had included in my column.

It is difficult to know if the call from our former temporary boss around the same time was a coincidence or part of the campaign. He did not focus on that part of my column at first, perhaps a diversion to feel me out, and when he finally got to that part of column, he asked if I had checked with her about it first.

I told him I had tried and then her name did not come back into the conversation.

I don’t know if he read her poem from last week or understood the significant passage in relation to me if he had.

She is a very clever word smith, crafting her work sometimes in which only the target gets the message, and though being called crazy, clever and elusive did not offend me the way her forgiveness poem had, I got the message.

Clearly, she believes her own stalking story and is frustrated by the fact I’ve avoided talking to her, looking at her or being in the same place with her when possible, seeing these things as being elusive and clever rather than simply living up to the terms of our agreement not to interact.

Her over reaction to my column sent a different message I didn’t completely understand.

She did not screech at me when we briefly talked, suggesting that maybe someone had already calmed her down. She simply wanted me to remove a reference in the column, to which I agreed, telling her I didn’t completely trust my source – although I actually did.

The ruckus stunned me because it came out of left field and suggested that I had somehow accidentally hit a nerve. But what nerve and why? The column had nothing to do with her, or did it?

 

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