I Love the Look of Neon in the Morning

The neon that rules the night fights the sun on a bright September morning. The messages of twisted tubes - Pizza, Billiards, Miller Lite - are all wrong, hung over, weak from being up all night. I understand their tepid response to the irrationally exuberant sun - tired, unshowered, and driving on autopilot down the one pothole-strewn road that the stimulus package is not repaving, I lament for the umpteenth time that I am not and never will be a morning person. The sunglasses I had made extra dark are still not dark enough today, but they let in those pale pink blue and yellow lights that catch my sleep speckled eyes, hinting that this glare will deepen into a golden day. By noontime I will be showered, busy and happy, and by dusk I will assess whether I have squandered one of the last lovely days before winter. And then maybe I will drive past the signs again as they take over the night gratefully and wish that I could go back and start over again.

Tsunami

It seems that most people

Hatch dreams

At the beach

But I have known

For a long time

That the beach

Is where dreams go to die

The wind and the water

They

Unravel

Everything

When the tangle of thought

And emotion

Is too tight

The beach is where I find them

Unspooling

That is where

I feel rage

And it dissipates in the wind

As I try to walk it off

And then

I think

No one will see how deep it runs in me

The beach

It has more broken things than whole ones

It sweeps what is fragile

Away

And dumps the remains back

Days weeks years

Later

Shells

Fish

Children

Societies

Refuse to treasure

Treasure to refuse

Paradise

To whom?

January 2005

Autism the Cause

An unpublished op/ed from 2006. Times have changed.

We learned to live with autism as a disorder, now we need to learn to live with it as a cause

I went shopping today after I dropped my children off at school. It was a tough morning; they were crabby, bickering all the way. So it was with relief and happiness that I went to do some errands on a gorgeous spring day. Our lives have been busy - we were all home for April vacation– so it was nice to meander through the store alone after a week full of kids, movies and too many French fries. When I got to the check-out counter, the gentleman at the register offered the woman in front of me a chance “to donate to a good cause.” I was ready to give, I thought, there’s always a worthy cause and I always give something: cancer research, Jerry’s kids, food banks, whatever. Except this time I saw the puzzle piece logo and I froze - the cause was mine. Here it was, a nationwide chain raising money for Autism research. I felt validated, elated, and profoundly ambivalent.

We have been shouting in the darkness about the autism epidemic for so many years that, now that the lights are on and someone is listening, I found myself startled and blinking. Suddenly, I felt exposed and vulnerable. It isn’t as though other causes have not touched our lives; we gave for cancer research before and after family members were taken by that disease. But it is hard to overcome that protective instinct that makes you want to shield your family from the scrutiny that comes with autism and its misunderstood history. It was almost easier to be the underdog because then we could keep it on a small scale; we could band together as parents and help our kids within our communities, and life would go on.

Autism affects families in vastly different ways, and so to have our son’s autism, which we have worked for years to make a positive force in our lives, become, by association, a full-fledged fundraising behemoth, perhaps we should expect to feel conflicted. Autism-the-cause does not describe my son or our family; autism-the-cause does not begin to touch the beauty and humor he has brought to our lives; autism-the-cause does not make us better or worse as parents but it does expose our family to a more public kind of attention, and more opportunities for understanding – and misunderstandings, as well.

And there’s a cynical side to it – now that autism has affected so many families of people in high places, autism is the cause du jour, just another ribbon, bracelet, or bumper magnet. No one really wants to be a bumper magnet – soldiers at war, people with cancer and aids, people with autism. Even as it raises awareness, which is a good thing, those magnets seem to me like a flip and cursory nod to issues so serious I would just as soon not see it on the back of a vehicle. But expressing that sort of vitriol about something an innocuous as a magnet is a kind of denial, too, that maybe things are not so dire that we need autism to be a cause.

But we do. Autism is a lifelong disorder for those who are disabled by it; they need assistance in communicating with and interpreting the larger world.

So, in spite of my reticence and thanks to the Herculean efforts of many, many people, autism has emerged as a full-fledged cause, and deservedly so. Money is desperately needed to research the current epidemic and to develop therapies and educational programs for this growing population of people disabled to varying degrees with varying outcomes.

On a morning when autism was, for once, not demanding most of my attention, it popped up and snagged me when all I really want to do is find a new book bag for my daughter. Now, just as I got used to autism grabbing my attention in the form of an 11-year old boy, I will get used to it grabbing my attention at the check-out counter. It is an adjustment I am happy and grateful to make.

John Updike has taken over my life

What to make of middle aged silences?

It seems that more and more of the conversations we do have are mere circles around the ones we should have. We have built strong and study scaffolding around each other in a sincere effort to support on another, noting our foibles and weaknesses. It is a respectful but tense silence, at least on my side, for I harbor a fear that I am going about things all wrong without a forum in which to sift through the contents my fertile and overactive imagination.

Some would say that that is what therapists are for, and in the wee hours and I lay worrying about the course of my life I think this might be true. But my time with therapists has been explaining rather than learning; and so far I have never left an appointment knowing once ounce more than when I walked in – all I have done is clarify my own position with myself. That is useful but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Friends are better if you can find them and make time for them.

Writing is even better.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time convincing myself that I am not an angry person, but there is no question that I am driven more strongly and specifically by anger than anything, even love. Perhaps it is time to embrace it, harness it, turn it into something practical. I have waited long enough for the moment when these things will come out, and if process the old things maybe it will improve my ability to cope with the present.

I know that this is in some ways the opposite of what I have learned with cognitive behavioral therapy, but I think there is room for both approaches. Mere acceptance of all things past is not possible for me, but accepting that those moments are over and that I cannot carry or assign blame for them seems like the right thing to do. And allowing myself to be paralyzed in the present because of the past is absolutely something that I need to overcome, and that is what brings me to the keyboard today.

How much of the past am I injecting into today’s silences, and hoq much am I projecting my own worries into other’s quiet? Plenty. But let me also add that women, for the most part, are faced with the questions of middle age head on and from the inside out. You can actually hear the doors slamming inside your own body and that is a process that screams for attention. The shifting tides of hormones require that we look at our choices and come to peace with them.

Men, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of circumstances. They harbor the illusion that they have the option to start over, that they can rend and discard the fabric of their lives and begin again. Women only think in terms of a new weave, of mending and patching, of adding new yarn and fabric. Of course there are new beginnings for both sexes, but this process that begins in your 40s is so much more concrete for women because the impetus comes from within; you can change or implode or explode. For men, it is all external. From the male perspective – and this is a sweeping generalization, to be sure - women, by all evidence, are going insane, the children are no longer cute and adoring, and the job market is narrowing. Retirement is no longer what parents do. They are trapped, and so they set about acquiring as much stuff as possible to show that they are, by some measure, successful. This is often in direct contradiction with the women’s desire to simplify their lives as they become overwhelmed with the job of caring for the stuff their husbands and kids are bringing home. But with the arrival of each new toy the women harbor a hope that this proves that he is not preparing to start over; that the convertible is fine so long as the only girl in the passenger seat is your teen aged daughter.

And then, like sunshine breaking through clouds, there are moments of surprise, where one of us makes an observation that reaches the other in an unexpected way. Like the man devoted to punk rock sharing a moment of opera that he heard on the radio. This man who never showed interest in that art form but who has a keen appreciation for excellence in any shape, has an understanding of the unique gifts that people are blessed with and can make something extraordinary. These are the moments that tell me I am in the right place, that those flashes of beauty, devotion, and revelation will find me no matter how far out to sea it feels like I am. That is where the person transcends gender and souls speak, and we recall and know what it is to fall in love more deeply than ever.

Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between deference and giving in. Deference is more noble, more willingly practiced; giving in is done indulgently sometime grudgingly, it indicates that your idea was better but that you don’t want to fight or have already conceded defeat. Witnessing children duke it out shows that we learn giving in long before we learn deference; some people clearly never learn it at all, and they are the ones that keep score. So I am learning how to make those distinctions and chronicle things with blame and giving and sniping; I want the subjects of my stories to be treated with deference and still be true – to couch the sometimes chronic pain in terms that have no hint of score settling but really of story telling – I want people who are textured and earthy with ragged edges and inconsistencies and bad grammar. I will fight the urge to put gauze over the lens. With every short story I read I see the beauty in this economy of detail, and know that I will have to write a lot to pare it all down into something compact, tasty; weighty and still digestible.

I don’t even read much Updike – too flinty masculine New England for me, but the world he paints is so recognizable it almost hurts. Not almost - it does hurt, physically. I think all I can muster at this moment is my despair that the writing life is not one that I can survive within or survive without. I suspect I cannot chronicle this life, birth these stories without unimaginable pain. And yet the weight of the pregnancy is becoming unbearable, and I know that in time something good will happen if I will only allow it.

Eight years and counting

The eighth anniversary of September 11 brings cloudy skies, and rightly so. Unlike that blindingly clear day, everything is murky now. We are mired in a jobless recovery from a recession that snuck up on us, an no one seem to really know how to fix health care, and everyone is cranky about it. We expected that September 11 would change the way we live radically, instantaneously, but it didn’t - instead it visited upon us a long, slow, steep decline that we still fail to comprehend.

I remember calling my mother in Saint Louis as the towers burned. ‘I have been waiting for something like this to happen my whole life,” I said. “That’s terrible,” she replied. “People are jumping out of the buildings.” “I don’t mean that,” I tried to explain, “I mean that this is a defining moment for my generation. I always heard about Pearl Harbor, about the assassinations, about events that everyone else remembers happening with a sense of manifest destiny. And with that came an identity, a place in history that shaped how you look at the world in the space of a moment. Everything that happens from this moment on will be thought of in terms of before and after this day.”

I still believe that. September 11 set George Bush on a course for disaster but in a more roundabout way it set Barack Obama on a course for victory. If Bush (and so many others complicit in the march to war and financial ruin) had not been so terribly wrong, people never could have made the leap of faith that brought Obama forward. But where that leap of faith will take us remains to be seen. Will his eloquent hopes lead us to a sustainable future? Can one man cure a crippled legislature?

I think the mentality that there were terrorists at the gate created by September 11 allowed bankers to gamble and regulators to turn a blind eye. Like the 1920s after World War I, a war that was decimating a generation provided all the rationale required to pursue the high life. The post 9/11 world allowed the government and media to hype the beauty of having it now just at the moment that the generation who saw the danger in that philosophy was fading away. No one was willing to say no to anything except personal responsibility. Who knew what the future would bring; why wait when you can Buy It Now, just like on eBay.

And still, for every one of us that has reacted in fear and denial there are so many who have been humbled, who have worked to understand our responsibility to act thoughtfully. It is that appreciation, that sense that if we try to listen we can come to an honest conclusion about what is right for us, that brought us to the conclusion that is Barack Obama. We have so much history to overcome in this process. Not just racism but the politics of money, legislative and judicial inertia, and party organizations that no longer make any sense. Many a good public servant has fallen prey to the duplicitousness of friends and enemies alike.

September 11, the wars, and the Crash of 2008 robbed us of what little trust we had manage to recoup after Watergate and Viet Nam. Restoring it is a tall order for one man, but we have done more with less.

The August of Benign Neglect

Summer arrived too late and fall has appeared early. As Jimmy Carter once pointed out, life is not fair. Now that it is cool enough to take a close look at the garden I see that nature is making a mad dash to correct itself. The yellowed greens of September are showing the effects of a rainy July; echinacea and black eyed susans that grew too quickly once the sun appeared in August have flopped over in exhaustion, spent from the sheer excitement of a whole summer in a single month. And the day lilies, still confused by it all, are flowering randomly when they should have been finished in July. The zinnias fell prey to the Japanese beetles just as soon as they went in, and even the daisies gave up in disgust after weeks of rain. The tomatoes are trying to forgive and forget, this being my first year and all, but only the tiny yellow pear variety yields a daily bite or two, which I nibble for lunch (that way I don't have to share). The sedum, just ready to bloom, is swamped with bees while the lobelia saunters through in cornflower blue, oblivious to it all. See? I have brought you mums as a peace offering for not paying attention to you all month.

Double Solitaire

I wrote this a few years ago. Today is the seventeenth anniversary of my father's death.

The journey began simply, with a round of Go Fish. I was playing cards with my eight-year old daughter while her younger brothers paraded around the living room to Souza marches, wooden spoons in hand serving variously as batons, trombones, flutes and drumsticks. As the boys circled the sofa, we played our game. It progressed quickly; the cards had been poorly shuffled from the last game and she won. She leapt up to join the parade, leaving me to shuffle and put the cards away. I watched them march happily as I shuffled the deck and, without thinking, laid out a row of seven cards in front of me.

As I dealt the cards for solitaire, in my mind the cotton tablecloth turned to smooth polished cherry, the track lighting to a china lamp on my left and our dining room to a corner of the living room in our family house in St. Louis. Across from me I saw my father, playing his own hand of solitaire, deftly, seriously, quickly. It was the early 1980s and in those days we played double solitaire endlessly. He would play with anyone who was willing and as we sat in the delicate but sturdy cane chairs that my mother painted with pastel flowers on a black background before she married, the hours and the cards flew.

The games were fast-paced and good-natured but there was a frenetic quality to them.
It was the closest thing to exercise I ever saw Dad engage in (we used to howl at his morning calisthenics, which consisted of making tiny circles with outstretched arms and toe-touching that somehow never involved actually bending over). But when my turn was over and I observed him playing with my Mother I saw that he wasn’t playing, he was working.

Mom said he was learning to think again and she was right. The old ways of thinking and doing had washed away in a flood of booze, and now that the tide had receded he was repairing the damage, repaving the mottled roads in his brain. Decks of cards and stacks of encyclopedias and dictionaries crowded his side of the table and the library table behind the winged back where he spent his afternoons. When he wasn’t playing cards he was completing crossword puzzles, one right after the other. That’s how he filled his days during those early years of their retirement. He was learning to live again and he did it one puzzle, one game at a time. We bought new decks of cards when the old ones wore out and kept him supplied with crosswords and new, more specialized dictionaries for finding the right words: rhyming dictionaries, medical dictionaries, crossword dictionaries, thesauruses.

In time he turned his attention away from the cards (the puzzles remained, always) and began watching more television, which seemed like a step backward at first. He watched Wheel of Fortune and the Price is Right, Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw, and then, gradually, The Cookin’ Cajun and The French Chef. I had moved away by then and when I came to visit, it was he and not my mother who made dinner and traded recipes with me. The man who, throughout my childhood, hated onions and ate canned pears with cottage cheese every night was cooking with garlic, fresh thyme and sesame seeds. Hershey bars smeared with butter (no kidding) gave way to sorbet, oysters on the half shell and homemade soup. After almost 40 years of cooking my mother was thrilled to turn the kitchen over to him, and he gave me my first serious cookbook, Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook. It’s out of print now.

But those card-playing days started it all. They were his entry back into the family after years of physical and emotional absence. Typical of his generation, there was no twelve step process or open acknowledgement of alcoholism. Instead there was a new, carefully constructed companionship: rides in the car, casual meals out, shared books on history, stories told of World War II and a life lived mostly in small town Iowa. There was reading, punctuated by snoring, before the well-tended fire. And with his grandchildren he renewed the sweet rituals of our childhood with trips to the five and dime for treats and baseball cards, and long babies’ naps on his ample lap. Through all of the years he never lost his gift for calming babies.

Who is to say what makes someone withdraw for years at a time and then suddenly awaken? Watching him is as close a look as I’ve ever gotten to the door between this world and the one where depression stifles every impulse to live and connect. I sense it sometimes, the numbing sensation that makes me want to bury myself in the newspaper instead of tend to the responsibilities of daily life. That feeling of being wholly unequal whatever task life presents, however simple and achievable it may be, it is almost impossible to stop the sense of inner implosion once it has begun. Sometimes it takes an hour to ride it out, sometimes a day, sometimes a month. Only when I have emerged on the other side can I see where I’ve been and try to decipher what it was that brought me back into the light.

I observe Our Boy with autism and I cannot help but wonder if my father is lurking in the foggy netherworld that sometimes envelopes him. He inhabits both worlds at the same time and is somehow at home and a foreigner to each one in a single moment. I know that science will never draw a line between alcoholism and autism, but I cannot help thinking there is something about filling an inner void that characterizes them both. There are moments when I look into Our Boy's eyes and see my father looking back at me, hurt, bewildered, obstinate. To see Our Boy is to view human emotion distilled down to the essence, he knows the purest joy, the greatest sadness, the deepest confusion, the wildest rage, and all of them change as swiftly as the New England weather. There isn't any meanness and guile, though there is selfishness and manipulation, and this was so true of my father too. He wanted to achieve but he only really knew how to give and as a result he gave away most of what he had, and then some. It was only when his body began to break and the expectations were gone that he found the opportunity to seek and out and be who he was. I think that is what we will have to do for Our Boy – create for him the world where he can be. Ironically, perhaps, autism will give him that freedom, for no one expects him to be any more than he is, though we will fight his oblivion every day so that he can be free to communicate his needs to the world in hopes that they might be met.

We can try to give Our Boy what I could not give my father and what he was incapable of asking for. He wanted only to get along and be loved by those he loved, and in 20th century America that wasn’t enough. The rags-to-riches American dream eluded him, but he loved and was loved in the way that only the impenetrable Irish male can. His body and his brain succumbed to addiction and depression and when the physical pain cut through the numbness – when it was more painful to be drunk than sober - he dug his way out and started over. And lucky for him there were people there to meet him on the other side and play cards with him. When Our Boy is ready to play I will be at the table, waiting.