Connecting the Dots

  I’ve referred before to a woman friend who’s therapist  cautioned her, “No, dear, no connecting the dots. Not for you, no no no!”  I thought it was funny because I saw how true it was for her, that she could so easily be led so far astray that she couldn’t find her own way back. But I also know that the same could probably also apply to me.  And yet I am compelled to do it. Or something like it, which is that idea of the six degrees of separation. Perhaps I kid myself that playing six degrees of separation is a safer form of being master of all you survey than connecting the dots. It’s probably just another form of ego-mania. Anyway, that being so, I still intend to comfort myself with the knowledge that whenever I walk into a room and notice how many people are there, I know that there are that many egos in that room. 

I got on this subject while reading a book that I came to because it is in the bibliography of another book I’m reading. While reading the latter, I Googled the author and found that her home address was in the same building in which my sister and her late husband lived for many years. Which of course makes the connection all about me! (That’s the humorous part.)  The author’s name is Edith Jacobson, M.D., she’s a Psychoanalyst, or was, and the book, The Self and the Object World, is fifty years old, so, I don’t know her status.

I should probably say that for my connecting the dots I often have to rely on my sister for my starter connection, though not always and not always completely. As in the following: 

My significant other, when I met her 23 years ago, was the widow of a filmmaker by the name of Konstantine Kalser.  Konny, as he was called, was the son of two German Jewish immigrants who came to America as part of the same wave of immigration in which Albert Einstein arrived. Konny's father was an actor, Irwin Kalser, who played the part of the Red Cross Inspector in the movie Stalag Seventeen. Konny's mother, Irmgard von Cube, was a screenwriter who had to her credit among others the film Johnny Belinda. And Irmgard, during her travels around Hollywood, had at some moment in time an affair with Alexander Korda, who those in an ancient age bracket even ahead of mine might have known as a famous director and producer of movies in The U.K., and the United States. And Alexander’s son, Michael, a very big cheese in the publishing industry, had an affair with Margaret, the wife of my late brother-in-law, Burton Glinn, who, because Michael was also Burt’s good pal and all, divorced said wife, and later married my sister. Michael and Margaret continue to age gracefully in the horse country north of NYC.* 

Now, if I post the above, I will be leaving it to you, fellow web-surfer, to determine whether this sort of stuff is anything more than obscene titillation.

I suppose I could add at this point that I have a million of them and that they are part of what floats my boat.  

*Correction: Margaret Korda passed away April, 2017.