We Go With Him

Clearly We Lead a Charmed Life

After a bike ride, we went to see if the Mexican fast food place was open and were not surprised that it was not due to having, like every business and residence near it for miles on miles, no power. Having found ourselves all off from school / work, Jim drove down the local state road onto the interstate and thence to another local state road. Every signal light except for one at a major intersection was out. Everything was closed aside from some grocery stores whose dim lights said they were powered by generators.

We saw billboards on their sides, trees at every angle and occasional bits of buildings on the ground.

There was a line at the one open gas station reaching into the road way, with many people wielding gas cans so they could fuel their generators. A few stores in one area had lights on and then everything was dark.

We drove further and everything was dark so we drove back north to stop at the one lit-up McDonald's. Charlie had been smiling the entire time and kept it up throughout the adventure which involved dropping me off to stand in a line along with about 100 other people at the McDonald's, Charlie and Jim coming in to wait for a bit and Charlie gaining the attention of all when he said loudly 'Gong Gong PoPo Rocco!', us responding cheerily, Jim and Charlie back in the car circling the parking lot 4 times and Home Depot once and then hanging in the parked car listening to a somber Phil Schaap on the Art Blakely birthday broadcast. I remained in the slow-moving line, appreciating the politeness and patience of everyone in it and the very busy workers and the people who seemed to be in McDonald's only to charge electronics and use the WiFi.

Everyone in the line had the same story: No power. People were walking out with shopping bags full of McDonald's.

(Proof that McDonald's will be the last bastion of civilization when the apocalypse really comes?)

(Well, maybe, at least in New Jersey.)

We live smack in the middle of the zone that news outlets report as having no electricity. Why we have ours, as do residents of some part of our street but not others, is clearly an indication that we lead a charmed existence and I continue to plug in Charlie's iPad every moment he's not using it.

Finding ourselves in endless lines waiting for non-essential but in our view essential items is the stuff of our life (and has been for years with Charlie) so, unlike most of the people around me, I saw no reason to wonder why I was standing in such a line. The long wait was just one of those things we do.

Even more, living through a 'natural disaster,' while certainly not routine, has a bit of a familiar feel living as we do ever in the knowledge that Charlie could have 'the big one,' an extreme behavior storm touching down at any moment of the day and night.

He was cheery when I finally walked to the car with some extra hamburgers and a free French fry the young female worker had given us for no particular reason and ate it all up. He looked out the windows as Jim drove and went to his room, showered, wanted a second walk.

I used sometimes to call just after 5pm 'the witching hour' and it remains such. The need for that habitual burrito set in and Charlie was in its grip. We looked up every Mexican restaurant in the northern half of New Jersey and called them and got no answer. We gently noted how lucky we were to have lights on and Internet, all the more as Jim and I read about houses burnt to the ground and the wreck of the beach island that (until Charlie became such a great ocean swimmer that we could not keep up with him) we spent many summer days at -- Jim showed me image after image of boats in a pile, the ocean in the streets, beach houses flung from their foundations atop other beach houses.

Charlie stood, sat in his brown chair, stood and listened to us saying very gently that things were 'closed' and you could tell from his face he was trying to gut it out and he sat in his chair and burst into tears with the effort and stood up. I intervened and his requests, which were about his obsessive anxiety, petered out -- obviously understandable! his school is closed on Wednesday and I anticipate it will be all week; the so to speak good thing is, Jim's and my schools / places of employment are shut down too. They're pumping out water from the subway tunnels and the mayor of Jersey City, 75 percent of whose residents have no power, has said that non-essential vehicles are not allowed and I don't know if he would buy our story that getting Charlie Vietnamese food means it is essential for us to be on Jersey City roadways!

Charlie went to his room and came down and, while I put his blanket in the dryer, we all went for a walk. It was dark at that point and the street where all the houses are dark except for those from which dim light and the burr of generators were apparent was uncanny to be on, as was it to pass the darkened house of Nemesis Dog whose majestic pine tree's trunk had snapped so its fulsome branches were bundled on the ground.

We got home and Charlie ate rice, shrimp and apples with a chaser of crackers and listened to iPad music for a long time while sitting on his bed. He looked uneasy while intermittently smiling. Jim went to check on him and then came down with the blue blanket which I rinsed out and stuck in the dryer and returned, hot and dry, to a happy boy who gradually settled down to sleep.

I can charge the iPad in the car but not the dryer!

Yes, we live a charmed life.

Storm Outside Not Inside

Aside from continually checking the charge on Charlie's iPad and my phone lest we lose electricity, and iterating and reiterating what a great boy he was and how we were spending a very challenging day together, here's what we did the day Cyclone Sandy hit.

Charlie and I went for a morning walk after I'd done a morning run that enabled me to realize, storm or not, our town was picking up the leaf piles so I moved the black car into the driveway just in time. (You can still see a pile of leaves in the photo because some people had put their leaves on the sidewalk to keep them away from storm drains and those leaves were not picked up.)

We were the first customers at the burrito place (they weren't really surprised, haha) and then went on another walk.

Then the tropical stormesque aspects of Sandy became apparent (high and blustery strong winds, rain though not as much as from Hurricane Irene, flickering lights, a fire engine and police showing up for a possible power line fire up the street) and we had to stay inside. Charlie was something less than thrilled about this with his non-thrilledness peaking around 5pm, but he got over the hump, with some intervention. In as non-alarmist a way as possible, we mentioned that there was a curfew imposed by the police till 7am. And then we all had to agree, we were having a great day and a fun one. Together.

It was like being in a storm at the beach with the house rattling and creaking, the winds roaring and the rain splatting down. Charlie went to sleep.

The subway isn't supposed to open till Wednesday at the earliest and City Hall in Jersey City is surrounded by water so who knows what will happen the rest of this week -- well, maybe not as much trick or treating as planned.

(No worry there to us: Charlie said "done" long ago to Halloween and he is probably the one or two children in the cosmos who does not eat any candy and I mean any.)

 

How To Prepare For a Frankenstorm

"Sandy? What kind of a name for a storm is that? They should just call it Hurricane Frankenstorm," said Jim as we backed out of our driveway to go ride bikes from Bayonne to Jersey City.

(And you thought we were backing out of the driveway with a car loaded with our electronic appliances that actually work, a lot of dark blue t-shirts and Patagonia shorts and pants and sweatshirts, and Thucydides in translation and the OCT, to evacuate.)

Jim and Charlie rode bikes with a mighty wind blowing in the morning. Charlie had lunch, Charlie napped until I woke him for his afternoon meds and after the Big Autism Center alert system had informed us 'closed Monday and Tuesday as this storm is to hit NEW JERSEY on Monday lateish or Tuesday earlierish,' we loaded up the bikes and met a little rain and I dropped off Jim and Charlie in a Bayonne park so the wind would be at their backs and then had to move a Hudson County parks barrier so I could get out of the park back into Kennedy Boulevard.

(Obedient Asian American in me said, wait till those uniformed men come back to move it. Me as I am now said, move it, drive the car through, replace the barrier, get on with life.)

As it turned out, the wind was coming from the north and not just the south so Jim and Charlie got more wind than expected. Liberty State Park itself was closed and I met them at the prearranged alternate location, the parking lot for the Liberty Science Center light rail underneath the turnpike.

We got Vietnamese food (the restaurant owners shrug at weather) and went home, Charlie's stomach settled and we went for a very pleasant walk, noting that the wind inland where we are is not as strong as it had been on the bay, by the Hudson River.

Charlie hung around the kitchen and kept looking at me. Jim and I gave him about 60 million assurances (slight overestimate, in the style of Biblical authors) that he was doing great, we were going to have fun on our unexpected staycation vacation holiday hurricane-ation together. I got Halloween treat bags ready for Charlie's eight classmates (all boys this year; there were two girls in his room last year) and he nibbled at a bag of crackers, ate some apples and went to bed by 10pm.

The wind is getting mightier and louder, it has yet to start raining, there is not an unbought D battery in New Jersey right now.

After weeks and months of insomniac boy -- so that we have grown accustomed to turning off all the lights to urge sleep -- I can navigate this house quite well in the dark. It is a life with Charlie gained skill I had not thought I'd so soon put to practical employment.

Yes, It Is Getting Very Windy Out There

Obviously good that Charlie and Jim got in a speedy 16-mile-ride on the Jersey horse country bike path on Saturday because it's been 'Hurricane Sandy's a comin' ' ever since in these parts and all the more because the hurricane is supposed to touch down in south Jersey and we're in what Jim likes to call north-central New Jersey but yes, that is rather close. My school and Charlie's school have already announced they are closed on Monday and Tuesday and Jim's hasn't yet but the subway may be closed starting on Sunday, so, it is de facto closed. Understandably, Charlie has had waves of anxiety, manifested in stomach trouble which we are dealing with as we can. It did mean he ended up eating two burritos on Saturday.

The burrito place could lose its power (and, of course, so could we), so that was as well.

Maybe Charlie is getting a bad feeling that his school could be closed for a whole week of 'fall break' as happened last year.

Charlie conked out after Saturday's fast-paced ride and but still got a full night's sleep. He and Jim did a local seven-miler in a big wind and we'll see whether bike rides are still posssible in the ensuing hours.

 

Wall Crumble and the Fragments We Sift Through

 

Five great days at school! With one anxiety bout at 1pm on Wednesday that was readily worked through.

Thursday's late sleep, and possibly all the effort funneled into good days including waiting for two days in a row for Jim to return late from work, and yet another Halloween weather event (a hurricane) due to hit early next week, and thymic distress, and Charlie was scarfing down two half-red-colored boxes of crackers on Friday night, demanding more after going up to bed, probably distempered that I had given him only a few, and directing his head to the wall.

Yes, the wall is a ruin but the more that crumbles out of it, the more I reflect that what had seemed catastrophic is now a matter of vacuuming and fixing.

Charlie actually stayed on his bed -- he really must have been tired -- and elicited a combination of singing-alonging about Irish rovers with Jim, smiling, crying, wild-eyeness, and then slept till 9am Saturday morning and got a very nice Saturday shave at the barber while Jim did some business emails sitting across from the row of barber chairs.

I kept the November 1 deadline in mind for a proposal I'm working through about all this Ancient Greek poetry that is swimming in my head and the fragmentary utterances of Charlie, and did the vacuuming.

Advance and Retreat

 

It's been a great week at school for Charlie plus good afternoons and full nights of sleep Tuesday and Wednesday. Tonight, Thursday, he is just falling asleep with 2am approaching. I sense he is feeling the coming of Hurricane Sandy.

I've been reading book 8 of Herodotus and the Persians have gotten up to the temple of Athena Pronaos (in the photo) in Delphi before being warded off and have burnt their way through Attica and destroyed Athens all the way up the Acropolis and been defeated at sea in the battle of Salamis and withdrawn via Thessaly and Thrace and should I visit again I think I will be aware of a lot more ghosts.

That Here We Pace

 

Jim was not due home till 8pm again on Wednesday and I anticipated a more nervous than on Tuesday Charlie, his pattern being (exemplified by the results of my three successive trips to Greece) to be less able to deal with things (well, some things, like Mom In a Foreign Country Time Zones Away) over time. But Wednesday afternoon passed indeed without incident and without extra just-in-case security measures involving pharmaceuticals.

For the better part of two hours, Charlie and I (said meds in pocket) walked in circles on our front lawn with a long sing-songy chant of 'Daddy Daddy Daddy' / 'Daddy coming' at the end (on Tuesday, we had started the Daddy-kenning just around 6pm). Various individuals, dogs, bike riders and cars passed us by.

Next Wednesday is due to be more challenging as, while Jim will only be working late one night (the usual Wednesday) -- he can't change his teaching schedule till next year; scheduling at universities is like that, a bit 'set in stone' and thou shalt not ask Registrar nor the Deanery to change nary a thing within the academic year -- it will not be until 10.30pm and there will not be a night ride as Charlie and Jim enjoyed very much last night.

I had memorized Simonides' epitaph for the 300 Spartans who died at Thermopylae -- I read it first the year I learned Ancient Greek when I was 14 (it's at Herodotus 7.28) -- and it has echoed in my head ever since.

ὦ ξεῖν᾽, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε / o stranger, tell the Lakedaimonians that here

κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. / we lie, their orders obeying.

('The Charge of the Light Brigade' about the 600 started to seep into my thinking too.)

Elegiac couplets are well to recite as one goes through one's paces.

 

October Images

When you leave a pumpkin on your porch, the squirrels, or squirrel-like creatures, get their trick or treat early.

 

 

When you work through a High Anxiety moment, buttressed by what must be done for extra security, you get a night bike ride with dad home at 8pm.

 

Don't Worry, We're Going To Start Reading Thucydides Soon

Knuckle-cracking at 2am despite, Charlie slept through till Monday morning. A two-hour post-bike ride nap has meant he can't sleep. He sat himself in the brown chair to listen to music for awhile after some extensive. thumping striding through the L of our first floor. It's nearing 2am and I'm deepening my knowledge of Ancient Greek geography to the cheery sounds of Barney.

All the various creations of Western civilization, right?

The OCD Merry-Go-Round

It's become all too clear that 2012 will go down for us as the year none of us slept or not with any sort of routine.

Charlie did sleep in till almost 10am Sunday and on one of three walks I had the thought that his anxiety is playing as big a role as anything in his insomnia. For around the past two weeks this has manifested itself in what I've started calling his McDonald's or death demands when he gets an idée fixe in his mind and not till hell or high water is it shaken free.

The moment of his doggedly insisting we go out because he had to go came earlier Sunday, after lunch. His wanting to accelerate the pace of things is generally more intense on Sundays, as if he wants to finish off the weekend to get to the routine of Monday and the school bus. He had started asking to go to Jersey City on Saturday night and the asking started Sunday early afternoon. We said we'd go in an hour and Charlie looked stricken. He sat in his brown chair and got his iPad and deleted several albums and asked me to restore them. I did so as he waited on pins and needles (it takes about ten or so minutes to sync the music via iTunes).

That went on four times. As in, no sooner did I hand Charlie back the iPad then he deleted a bunch of songs again. I suppose you could say it was as if he were driven by his anxiety-fueled OCD to create more problems for himself in what could be called a self-destructive manner.

The hour passed and we went to Liberty State Park and had a great time and got him Vietnamese food and went home and, as it was just after 6pm, we waited for Charlie's anxiety to ratchet itself up again. It did; our anticipation that it would helped. Knowing he would likely ask for the Golden Arches, I made rice and vegetables. Charlie ate the former. He looked nervously around the kitchen and I opened the dishwasher where I used to hide things like brownie mix in the infamous red box. No more! The cards are laid out and better for Charlie to know, no one is hiding anything from him.

If it is not apparent to you from my daily dogged blogging for the past seven years, I have more than a few obsessive tendencies myself. I'm sure I've always had such in me but things got more intense when I was thirteen. I've had thirty years to try to let go and let be; never underestimate the potential of cognitive-behavior therapy. Jim is also very good at reminding me when I'm on 'the merry-go-round' of my obsessions and Charlie likes it not at all when I'm on that ride.

And if we're going to require that he let go of his OCD, shouldn't I first distangle myself from mine?

(Though let me tell you, applying hindsight, I can see how often I indulged my obsessive tendencies in the name of helping him, zealously over-studying and doggedly championing therapies, protocols, opinions about autism.) (Well, I don't regret being obsessive in disputing what has been called 'anti-vaccine lunacy.')

Charlie figured out how to put his iPad onto shuffle for the songs and had a good time running around and listening to those before going to sleep around 9pm. I think he may be waking up now after five hours of sleep (it is after 2am) but that is already more than he's had for many a recent night.