Being steeped in the experience of playing connect the dots is an invaluable tool to possess for trying to unlock the meaning of Bettie Sellers deceptively simple poem “In the Counselor’s Waiting Room.” Here is a textbook example of why it would be a mistake to assume that learning critical thinking skills cannot is a waste of time. Facts are fine, but sometimes facts are just not enough.
The facts of the poem are these: In some unidentified town or city an unidentified young woman sits reading a paperback in the waiting room of a counselor with whom she has an appointment to discuss her conflicted feelings toward a quiet girl who lives in the same building.
Not a whole lot there, right? The use of critical thinking skills allows the astute and informed reader to speculate on the details not provided with a greater than 50/50 chance of being right on the money. The waiting room is most assuredly not in a city, but rather a small town and that town is located in the rural region of a state located in the U.S., probably Georgia, though possibly Tennessee. Furthermore, the counsel she waits to speak with is probably not a medical doctor and almost certainly not a psychologist. Her appointment with him is not intended to reconcile the conflict she feels about a burgeoning potential for lesbianism, but is rather designed to “fix” her of this deviant behavior and set her back on the road to normal heterosexuality which ends with marriage and children.
Pure speculation; a creative flight of fancy that may be as viable as another’s argument that the waiting room isn’t even located in America and that the counselor is a renowned European psychiatrist? Not even close. The description of the girl as “terra cotta” indicates a short but energetic life of being outdoors nearly all year round with plentiful sunlight even in winter. This is a girl who lives in the south and if her complexion isn’t a strong enough clue, the dead giveaway is the plethora of Baptists mothers roaming around like chickens with their heads cut off at the slight suggestion that they will live to see grandchildren. Nobody grows entrenched Baptists quite like the Southern Baptists of Dixie. As for Georgia being a more likely setting than Mississippi or Kentucky, it helps to know that the poet, Miss Sellers, spent a good deal of her life in Georgia and a good deal of her writing is set there.
As for the counselor not being a member of the medical community, well, first of all the waiting room is described as belonging to a counselor and not a doctor. The Baptist denomination is one of the most fundamentalist and conservative in the world and carries the burden of a long history of treating homosexuality as a deviant mental disorder capable of being cured or fixed.
The facts tell almost nothing. The critical thinking fills in all the gaps the poet purposely left out. That’s the beauty of poetry. A poet can get away with leaving huge chunks of vital information out. If Sellers had tried to use prose to relate this tale a short story and left out all that stuff, it would likely be an incomprehensible mess. Also of interest: Sellers lived and wrote for most of her life in North Georgia. That is also where the college is located where she spent 32 years as a professor. Probably the same kind of college where the terra cotta girl met the quiet girl down the hall of the dormitory where they live.
