Tales from the Shark Tank

Today is Joseph’s birthday. He has officially completed his sixth year. Originally deeply opposed to the idea, he is now not only reconciled but enthusiastic. I think the birthday pictures his classmates drew helped, not to mention all the assorted Thomas the Tank Engine characters that magically appeared in brightly wrapped boxes when he got up this morning. He was bouncing all over the place, hugging us, then his train, and then us again, happy-dancing the whole time.

Since baking with Mommy has become a treat as much or more than the finished product, I made no attempt to surprise him with his cake. I asked him what kind he wanted (chocolate), and enlisted his assistance in measuring, pouring and mixing. He watched proudly as the pan went into the oven.

What happened next is a matter for some conjecture, but the result is clear. There was cake all over the outside of the pan, and more blithely burning on the bottom of the oven. I strongly suspect that while the recipe called for an 8″ round pan, it should have been a 9″ pan. What remained inside the pan was not terribly neat around the edges, but frosting covers a multitude of sins, and something that will hold candles and permit the singing of “Happy Birthday” covers more. The kidling is six; he’s not a pastry critic. If it looks pretty much like a birthday cake, and tastes like a birthday cake, he doesn’t care one bit if one corner came off or it’s high on one side! It’s pretty good, too, which is a good thing. Now that it’s made and we’ve sung happy birthday over it and he’s eaten one bite, he wants nothing more to do with it. I think that’s illness more than anything; he hasn’t eaten much of anything else today either. But it’s still a good thing that we like it, since it appears we’ll be the ones eating it.

Then we went over to his grandparents, where he received more train equipment, including a water tower and two passenger coaches. That produced more hugs and happy-dances. That doesn’t count the other grandparents, whom we didn’t visit because Gramma has a virus and so does Joseph. Overall, he’s made out like a little bandit! It’s been quite a happy birthday for him indeed.

I am enormously proud of him, too. One of his gifts was “Curious George Flies A Kite”. It’s about 90 pages long. While Wick and I were getting ready to go over to his folks, our little guy read it for himself, cover to cover. I suspect he’s going to be another one who doesn’t remember when he learned to read. He has two biological siblings, neither of whom did that. It’s an interesting example of nature meeting nurture.

On Friday evening, the butternut tree in our front yard decided to dispense with all its leaves at once. I’m not sure what prompted the precipitation of foliage, as there was no perceptible breeze, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that on Saturday afternoon, on a perfect warm sunny Indian Summer day, all those lovely crispy bits of deciduousity were all over the front yard. They are still in the front yard as I type this, although they have been gathered into a large pile of leafage. Indeed, they have been gathered into a lovely big mound at least 30 times, and jumped in, thrown, wriggled under and generally scattered gleefully about as many times as I gathered them.

Joseph had been playing inside with his trains all morning, resisting all my blandishments and attempts to get him out the door. Finally, at the suggestion that we could go to the park, he put up his trains, put on his socks and shoes, and declared his readiness to embark. I followed him out the front door, keys in hand.

Keys proved to be unnecessary. We didn’t make it past the front yard. He spotted those leaves and immediately asked me to gather them for his entertainment, which I happily did. He ran around to the back yard for his little rake and helped as much as he could. Then the real fun began. He jumped into those leaves. He dove under them. He fell over backwards into them and then pulled them over himself. He tossed them into the air in handfuls. We had leaf fights. Those are rather like water fights only drier. They are every bit as gigglesome and hilarious. He got me to sit down on the grass and then buried me in leaves up to my shoulders. In short, we had a wonderful time.

The next thing I’ll be doing with those leaves is piling them on my herb garden and raised beds as mulch. By spring they won’t be recognizable as leaves anymore; the earthworms will have had a field day. I’ve explained to Joseph how the trees drink their food from the ground, and how putting the leaves down puts the food back in for other plants. He likes that idea. And next year, once again, I’ll make a “great big pile of leafs” for him to jump in, over and over. Who knows? When the backyard trees shed, I may get to do it again this year!

Today was a lot of fun. We took our son to an orchard to pick apples. We should have done it weeks ago; there aren’t many apples left on the trees. But Jospeh had a marvelous time, in a way completely different from the fun of removing fruit from overladen branches.

We had to hunt for those apples. The trees are dwarf varieties. Their lower branches are only a foot or so off the ground, and their highest only a few feet above my husband’s head. We had to look carefully to see apple-shapes against the colors of the no-longer-green leaves. My son got under each tree, calling clearly “apples? Where are you, apples?” He was so delighted when he spotted one. If it was very low (and most of them were) he would creep under the branches to pick and bring it out, putting it in the orchard bag so proudly. If it was above his reach but not by much – what he denominated a “middle apple”- I was supposed to pick it. The highest apples were Daddy’s to retrieve. He was making up apple songs and dialogues for birds to tell him where the apples were all the way home. And he must have thanked me for taking him apple picking at least twenty times.

My parents used to take me apple picking, and I’ve always loved it as one of the rituals of Fall. Now I see why they did it every year, and why they quit going when I grew up and got busy with my own life. It isn’t the apples. It’s the delight of a child in the finding and picking of them. Joseph and Wick and I will be back next year. Next year, we’ll go sooner. But tomorrow Joseph and I will be making apple pies.

My son’s sixth birthday is next weekend, and mine about 4 weeks later. I was looking in the mirror and thinking that I look very much as I remember my mom looking when I was in college. And then it struck me. When my mom was my age I was in college, in my senior year no less.

I do have some friends my age whose kids are the same age as my kid, but we are scattered. Here, when the parents gather for some function of the kindergarten class, I can look around and see that those parents are young enough to have been my children without my having been a teenage mother. They are very deferential, although one had the poor sense to ask me if I was raising my grandson. Joseph took care of that before I could do more than draw breath, running up to hug me shrieking “Mommy!!! I’m so glad to see you!” I paused to hug him back, then looked up smiling to say “no, he’s my son.”

But it’s odd, and occasionally awkward. Most of the time I couldn’t care less what the score is on the number of times I’ve ridden the planet around the sun, but this disaparity seems to call my attention to it fairly regularly. I got quite a startled look from one of my son’s teachers yesterday after the California recall results came in. She asked me what I thought about it. My response was that California had survived Reagan as Governor, and I figured it would survive Ah-nold. “Oh, that’s right, you studied history” she said. No, I told her, not exactly. I lived there at the time. It’s different for her. That whole era was one she studied in modern American history as a pivotal time for this country, and it was all of that. But to her, it’s something in a book. To me, it’s memory. And I wouldn’t think a thing about it, if I didn’t have a child in her kindergarten class.

I’ve been corresponding with a friend by e-mail, and her questions and comments have prompted me to verbalize how I deal with my son’s autism. I’ve copied it here, because I want to be able to come back to it.

“People keep telling me how lucky Joseph is to have us, but to me the luck is the other way: that we’re lucky to have him. I’m not sure quite how to say this. I rejoice in who and what my son is, rather than what he isn’t; I enjoy the things he can do rather than bewail those he can’t. I spend my time and energy on helping him find a way (teaching him to use a keyboard because he can’t control a pencil to write, for example) rather than get angry at the things he can’t learn at all (like pedalling a bike.) He gives me a view into another way of perceiving the world and expressing feelings. I can tell when he’s feeling as if the world is a whirling chaos when he uses his blocks to build lovely, soaring, balanced structures in the middle of the kitchen floor. It is his way of creating an island of order, and they are so beautiful. Happiness is a dance with high-lifted knees. Anticipation sparkles and hums a single note. There are no amorphous fears in his world, because there are no abstractions. Everything is concrete, even his make-believes. Yes, he had to be taught interactive play (still intermittent at best), but how should I fault that? I’m more or less a loner too, prefering to sit alone with my writing or my needlework or to be in the company of a few kindred spirits. Yes, he has to learn social interaction the way some of us learn to spell. Ok, he has time. He has all the time most people spend learning to read if nothing else, because he taught himself to do that sometime before he learned to speak understandably. It was quite a shock when the random sounds turned into speech at about 4 to find *he* was reading his Pooh books to *me* instead of the other way about. Not that there aren’t frustrations and tears. I will never forget the day I had to convince my doctor that no, all the bruises did not mean I was an abused wife, but only that I was the mother of an autistic three year old. But there are far more gifts than frustrations. He is my beautiful son, my greatest gift. Autism is just the name for how his brain is wired.”