Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

A Perfect Idiot

are unfit to take care of them. They try to reinsert them into their fami l ies, or into new fami l ies as in the case of Odette, or to maintain the ties between sibl ings. This wasn’t done for Odette, who hasn’t seen her sister in many years . . . It ’s a stressful job, I left my position in order to relax and get away from a telephone that might ring at any moment because you’ve forgotten to sign a certificate of i l lness or because you didn’t provide enough detai ls in your report about how things went in the meeting with an alcohol ic mother, who begged you not to disclose to your superiors that she hasn’t completely overcome her problem but can no longer l ive without her daughter! This was my biggest di lemma—how to deal with that kind of request. The cumulative stress of these last years—I can’t describe it to someone who hasn’t l ived through it.” “I can imagine it,” said her aunt, “something simi lar happens in every job, “every one of us must carry it out as he sees fit and wi l l be more or less involved. Maybe the solution is to stop giving a damn about what people think, Mel i—that ’s the key.” “That ’s the key?” Mel i said. “But imagine that your books are chi ldren and that you have to loan them out from the l ibrary! Over there I felt exactly l ike someone who has to decide who is capable and who isn’t, the parameters, the violence, money, alcohol ism, everything was nonsense. I’ve known wel l-to-do parents, exemplary ones, with a vi l la

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