Here’s a joke I heard on tv- A woman is bragging about her son to a friend of hers. She says, “My son just got into DeVry.”
Her friend replies, “What’d he do, open the door?”
Ba-da-bing!
I used to think that people were just feeling sorry for themselves when they said the way the human body responds to everyday life changes dramatically after reaching age 30. I realize now that they knew what they were talking about. When I was stepping over one of our many doggy gates as I was putting up groceries, there was a terrible burning pain that suddenly flared up on the inside of my right knee. It still hurts like hell, especially when I put a lot of weight on my right leg. I keep worrying I’ll hear something pop or snap, but so far it just hurts. Why this happened, who knows? But that’s what goes on once you reach a certain age, you get pains that seem to come from nowhere.
Today is Wednesday, grocery store day. My grandmother was in top form today, carrying on about how awful it is to get junk mail from charities all the time. She gave this speech not only to me, but also to the cashier and the woman bagging the groceries. She and my grandfather have gone on the warpath with charities having the gall to send them solicitations. My grandfather has gone so far as to keep a notebook about which charities send them mail, and the frequency with which they send it. Sorry, but this is absurd. Just throw away your junk mail if you don’t have any interest in a charity. Ralph and Gladys (my grandparents) are so upset you’d think they were receiving death threats, not charitable solicitations. I get worked up over some relatively minor stuff sometimes myself, so I’m trying not to judge them too harshly. But I can’t believe how much energy both of them are investing in this and how personally they are taking something that everyone with a mailbox deals with.
It works like this: Take the junk mail, walk to the trash can, drop the junk mail into the trash can. Stop playing Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew about something so inconsequential. My God…
This next paragraph is for my mom.
I know I dragged up a lot of unhappy issues with one of yesterday’s post, and in the interest of balancing things out, I wanted to bring up a good memory I have of being a child in your care.
I was at Publix when a logo on a can of deviled ham caught my eye. I realized I was smiling because I recognized the grinning devil from snack time when I was a kid. My mom used to keep Underwood deviled ham to put on crackers and make dip with. That was what I had seen, and the memories of my mom whipping a plate of snacks up for me after my ritual Sesame Street episode came flooding back. We would laugh and she would listen patiently as I would explain the excrutiating minutia of everything I had learned on that day’s episode. I remember when I first noticed there was a devil on the can, and how it freaked me out a little since church had filled my head with ghost stories about a devil. But my mom assured me it couldn’t be “THE” devil because this was a happy devil with a smile on his face. He was just happy that people liked his ham. From then on, I would check every can of Underwood deviled ham at the local Piggly Wiggly to make sure the little cartoon devil was smiling. It must have been interesting for my mom to try to shop for groceries with a little Asperger boy checking for unhappy devils and teaching other shoppers how to count to twenty in Spanish. It’s funny how things come around, because now I am sort of my grandma’s caretaker at the grocery store. I help her find the items she can’t find, I carry all her stuff, I help her in and out of the car, and I try my best to deal with her NT need to fill every second with the sound of her voice.
No, it certainly wasn’t all bad for me growing up. Another good memory I have of my mom is from before my sister was born, meaning I was probably four or so. It was December, and my mom had the house filled with Christmas decorations. My young Asperger mind was particularly fascinated with one decoration. It was a ring of candles connected to and resting underneath a ring of small metal angels. When you lit the candles, there was some sort of property of physics that would cause the ring of angels to spin slowly and make soft, chiming noises. I would stare at it in my Asperger way for long periods of time.
On this night, I wasn’t feeling very well, and I had gone into my parents’ room and told my mother I thought I was sick. She patiently got up with me, taking care not to wake my father. She led me into the kitchen and pulled up a seat for me beside the angel decoration and proceeded to light it. I sat there watching the angels fly, soothed by their gentle chimes and the knowledge that my mother would find some medicine to make my fever go away.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to grab an ice pack for my knee and throw away all this damn charity junk mail.
