As Doug's ex-wife impatiently waited for the water to boil, she continued lamenting her childhood, made wretched by not only her prematurely-departed father, but also by what she infantily construed as other "male-dominated" institutions.
Her mother had done okay, raising the children on her own; it had been a struggle, but Doug's ex-wife lacked for nothing that she needed, and even enjoyed the luxury of Barbie dolls complete with vast wardrobes.
But that was not the way it was supposed to be, the young Doug's ex-wife protested, and things weren't the way they were supposed to be, because of her stupid father who had tried to off the wrong longshoreman.
Doug's ex-wife went through her First Holy Communion okay, the white dress and rosary beads and all that, but as she entered her adolescence, she dumped God, having assumed God was some sort of faraway male figure.
In her mid-teens, having learned of a really cool hippie down in the mountains north of Lost Angeles, a guy who collected "chicks," Doug's ex-wife yearned to join them in their carefree promiscuity, and in fact had run away from home to join them.
Fortunately for Doug's ex-wife, an older brother of her mother had caught her twenty miles out of town and brought her back, sparing Doug's ex-wife the unhappy fate of being one of Charles Manson's "broads."
Doug's ex-wife graduated from high school, and wished to attend the University of California-Berkeley, but that wasn't possible, and so instead entered a college near Berkeley, so as to be as close to the action as possible.
This was the time of the great lettuce boycott.
Even though she had ditched the Roman Catholicism which had enriched her forebears, as with all lapsed Catholics, the Catholicism never evaporated.
It needs noted that one of the primary differences between Catholicism on one hand, and Protestantism (and also Judaism) on the other hand, is that Catholicism teaches that sharing in the sufferings of the afflicted is meritorious, while Protestantism (and also Judaism) teaches that making the this transient world a better place is more meritorious.
Whatever rocks one's chair, and the desire to share in the afflictions of the oppressed rocked Doug's ex-wife's chair.
And so Doug's ex-wife created the fantasy about herself, so as to be one of the suffering; this idea that she was not of northern Mediterraneac derivation, but sprung from one of the oppressed classes; that she was a Latina woman from the brown hordes south of the border.
In other words, she began identifying with something she was not.
The flame underneath the pot of water evaporated.
Doug's ex-wife turned up the valve, but nothing.
She decided supper would have to wait until her brother got home, to replace the 10-gallon tank of propane that fueled the one-burner stove.
