Mike looked really old. That was what struck me the most. He also had a low frequency tremor. He also had only one useable eye. the other one was all cataracted over. Portrait of three brothers No need for Photoshop. My two brothers and I are all in the same place at the same time, […]
Aside from seeing Mom on my side trip to New Jersey, the highlight will occur tomorrow (actually today, since I write my posts the night before). It is the day that I get to see Michael, my older brother. Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. I haven’t seen him since they moved him to […]
School I went to a school reunion once many years ago. High school. It won’t happen again. Reunions are for times one wants to remember, or re-live. Extended family Family reunions are a little different for me. My growing-up family wasn’t that big, but even so, visits we’d have were segmented. We’d drive out to […]
Different folks I was thinking about how babies react to different people. William seems to be happier with me than with his Nanna, for example. Now, the interesting part is, I haven’t had the experience of raising kids of my own, so I really don’t know what I am doing. But when I hold William, […]
William said his first word to me yesterday. Amazing for a 6 month old, but true. This is how it happened… He was standing on my lap and I made up this game. I said, “Ready… set…. JUMP!!” He seemed to enjoy it, so we just kept playing. I knew he was anticipating the jump, when I […]
I’m here outside Chicago with my grandchildren finishing up my 2nd full day. By the time you read this, however it will be the next day, so ‘yesterday’ below really means ‘two days ago’. Sorry for the confusion… Yesterday I mentioned William’s multimodal way of taking in information: his eyes staring at things I could […]
What do spinning, roller coasters, New York City, the Golden Gate Bridge, stolen building stones, helicopters and trains under water, a broken lock to a construction site, an elevated train that ran out of track flew through the air landing on a person in the East River and a bitten cheek have in common? Answer: […]
I am very interested in the concept of communication. This stems from my frustration in establishing a meaningful (to me) way to reach my brother Mike, who is autistic, profoundly retarded and nonverbal. This is one of the themes that I frequently revisit in this blog. Mental telepathy I recently read On Writing by Stephen […]
When I used to visit Mike at his group home, he would always respond to, “Gimme a high-five.” I don’t know where he picked that up, but he responded reliably, most of the time. Mike is my older brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. Mike is reacting to Dad’s request for a ‘high […]
Culling In getting organized to move, I’ve been going through all the stuff I have. The best method I came up with was to make a binary decision: Keep or Toss. That is really hard, since I don’t want to end up throwing away some reference book that I could use for my writing, or […]
