[Note: I’ll be taking a little break from the heavy topics I’ve been discussing for the past few days (Death, Uncertainty, Questions of Faith). Don’t worry though, I will be back with more heaviosity soon enough. Thank you all for reading!] Sometimes Mom just had enough. Typically she’d had it with Dad. Too many pictures, […]
Faith is a complete trust in someone or something without requiring proof. Infants have complete trust by dint of the actions of their parents. No baby wonders whether he or she will be fed, under normal conditions. It just happens, no proof needed. Is being fed, in the world of a baby equivalent to the […]
The pictures below are among the first I took of my brother Mike in my adult life. I started taking his picture on his 40th birthday at the Developmental Center. I wanted, somehow, to document his life, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. I wanted to include relationships between Mike and the […]
The great race Dad always liked to have his orange juice. Once when I was a kid, about 4 or 5 years old, he challenged me to a juice race. I don’t know if this was a way to get me to drink my juice or not, but I accepted the challenge. My Dad, not […]
Vacations My older brother, Michael is very low functioning, autistic and nonverbal. Now and then, he would yell and bite his hand. I suppose he was frustrated about something when he did this. We never quite knew what frustrated him. When I was a kid, we used to go camping in the summer. Mom told […]
Beautiful summer twilights depress the hell out of me. The same holds true about beautiful music by Bach, Hayden, Mozart and other great composers. I think it is the fact that these things are so beautiful is depressing me. The summer day at about 4:30 to 6:00 to me, represents death. I guess to the […]
Family pictures from one’s own childhood are tricky. The pictures of ourselves before we had the ability to form memories are useful only to the extent that we can say, “I have my father’s eyes,” or “I look just like my mother.” But in general, this is for others to say. What about family snapshots […]
Attention There are many factors that figure into the calculation of attention in a family. All other things being equal (which is probably a rare occasion), in families with more than one child, birth order plays a big role. When children are not separated by many years, sibling rivalry sets up a dynamic among the […]
As I mentioned previously, Mom remembered that Michael, my older autistic brother was at the Bronx Developmental Center for a little while in the mid to late 1950s. She would schlep there twice a day, once to drop him off and then to pick him up. The ‘state of the art’ thinking of the medical […]
I’m so glad that I can still talk with Mom. Even though we are on different coasts, I can still ask her about things in my childhood. She and I are practically the only ones left who have first-hand knowledge about those times. Over the years I’ve bombarded her with many questions about Michael, my […]
