Mom made me Halloween outfits. I don’t have a picture of the one where I was a bum, or maybe it was a clown. Yeah, it must have been a clown, since I had a switch in my pocket that would make my nose light up. Maybe I was a rummy. Who knows? One year […]
[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, […]
My interest in the brain arises from having a brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. For the longest time I wanted to understand what the brain does and why my brother is the way he is. Today’s post and yesterday’s post focus on an effort from 1934 to define what thought is and […]
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 […]
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 […]
It is getting harder and harder for me to be an existentialist these days. My wife and I are trying to pack up and move halfway across the country, and I am trying desperately to let go of things I don’t need and will probably never need. There’s the rub: ‘things I will probably never […]
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 […]
I’ve been watching some videos that I took years ago of my brother Michael and me. Mike is my older brother, who is low functioning, autistic and nonverbal. For me, an ongoing issue is whether my memory is faithful to actual events. It is important to me, although I’m not sure why. The videos refresh […]
