We Go With Him

California Thinking

I've had California on my mind a lot of late. Maybe because it's the holidays and, up until last year, we always went out to see my family in California. But now it's quite impossible for Charlie to take a 6-7 hour transcontinental plane ride: For one thing, he used always to like to curl up at the window seat, but forget about that now, he's approaching 5' 9" with long, long legs and size 11 feet. 

Maybe it's because Friday Jim and I met with our lawyer to sign a special needs trust for Charlie and our will. Yes, I am very glad those are signed and done, though now---thoughts ever to the future---I keep thinking about how we are going to have to get Charlie out to California. He being an only child and there not being anyone in New Jersey to look out for him after we are no longer around (yes, big gulp), Charlie will need to be out there when he is older. It will be good for him to be able to get to know my family---my cousins have children who are almost all just a few years older than him--- better before too long.

Or maybe it's because Jim and I figure, live in California and Charlie can bike ride year-round. While it does seem that he and Jim are trying to make bike-riding such a knows-no-weather sport, the reality is that it will snow in New Jersey. (On Sunday, if the weather forecast is accurate.) Jim and Charlie did get in a couple mile bike ride in the early evening, but one is not inclined to go too far in temperatures in the low 30s.


Or maybe it's because I have been reading Erica's blog, The flight of our Hummingbird , about her life in California, about long days and really long nights taking care of her young daughter Izzy, whose struggles seem to go, on, and on. Charlie's have been of a quite different sort, but I know the feeling of hope-drained worry after a child has the same difficulties day after day after day, and nights too.

In Charlie's case those have been SIBs. These seem to be a lot more under control now. Friday after the bike ride, Charlie wanted to get in the car and, as it ensued, go to Jersey City for Vietnamese food. But we had just gone there on Wednesday and offered some local alternatives that Charlie usually likes, but this time he didn't want any of them. He was very distressed and asked a number of times for other things. We went home and Charlie sat for several minutes in the car in the driveway, then came inside on his own. And after going into his room and watching a video or two on his iPad, he was calm and came down and asked to go out again.

It was getting late and Jim talked about driving down to the beach and getting rested up, and Charlie went back upstairs to go to bed.

He does like to sleep in his own bed, drive around to see the usual sights and places. The last time we went to California in 2008, Charlie was not happy most of the time, largely because everything was different and he just wanted to be back home.

We'll go out again someday. And in the meantime, we will be making the most of being here in Jersey, here where we are.

But a little California thinking (about wandering through these bookstores) does not hurt, no?

Can't Beat the Heat So Just Join In

This summer of 2010 seeming very likely to be about to go down as the Hottest Ever Since They Started Keeping Records (at least so far for June), it's inevitable that I would post about it. Especially as I am, truth to tell, a heat wimp.

By which I mean, even though my genetic make-up---southern Chinese around Guangdong---would seem to 'predispose' me to being at home in hot, humid climes with the sun beating down, I really prefer summer NorCal style, that infamous San Francisco summer weather that makes for shivering tourists (thinking that if it's summer in California, it must be sunny and palm trees, right?) waiting in the cable car line on Powell Street with just bought 'SAN FRANCISCO' sweatshirts hastily pulled over their tanks and shorts. 

I've got the phrase 'and the fog comes in every evening' stuck in my head.

Yeah and '56 degrees.'

Growing up, I quickly discovered that the Bay Area (I'm an Oakland gal) was charmed when it came to weather. My mother is from Sacramento in the Great Central Valley and it was on summer visits that I first got a taste of 99+ degree heat that made the sidewalks so hot you could (as my late Uncle Quonson liked to say with a grin and a twist of his mouth) fry an egg thereupon. My mom would bring towels so we wouldn't have to sit on burning hot seats and we made sure to bring the car whose air conditioning worked well (a cream Chevrolet Caprice Classic in my formative years). We also sometimes ventured down to San Jose with the sole aim of visiting not anything having to do with matters IT or computer-ish, but to go to Frontier Village; San Jose, to me, still carries a whiff of dusty orchards and one-story, faded stucco houses. 

For four years (also very formative ones---I was 4-8 years old) we lived on the other side of the mountains in Contra Costa County, in a tract home so new there were horses behind our back yard when we first moved in (my sister and I spent a great deal of time peering through a knothole in the fence to catch of glimpse of their tails). I still remember the row of lilies of the valley my parents planted outside our bedroom windows amid the tanbark and to the side of the big beige humming air conditioner---we hadn't needed such at our old house in Oakland.

From where I'm sitting on our tough, and highly functional (and large), IKEA couch, I can hear our air conditioner working away just outside the backyard living room window of our house here in north central New Jersey. We haven't turn it off in what must be weeks. Our bedrooms are on the second floor and when Charlie goes up to bed we really blast it; it's certainly cooler on the first floor, but Charlie, Mr. Creature of Habit if there ever was one, sleeps in his bed, in his bedroom.

My own inclination in such temperatures ( 90+ degrees Fahrenheit/35 degrees+ Celsius) is to bunker down inside wherever there's air conditioning with a book and/or my computer and a big cup of hot coffee, sometimes tea (yes, you read that right, hot coffee or tea---in 1988 I spent summer studying Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan; I had a room with a fan about as large as said laptop and learned to drink hot things to cool down). 

As you know, we don't exactly do that around here, at least not while Charlie is home and awake and rarin' to go on bike rides (he called for that within 10 minutes of stepping in the door Wednesday afternoon) and a walk (he and I went on one after a sudden bout of rain and thunder with the sun out). Charlie makes a complete wimp of me: No matter how high the mercury, how intense the 3pm sun on the concrete, how schwul-ish the air, he just keeps putting one foot in front of the other and walking on, and at a quite fast 'power-walker' pace. Charlie gets hot and sweaty but he just seems quite inclined to put up with it and do what he wants to do, walk, be it walking or riding, for miles.

(And I think I finally understand how those ancient Greek hoplites could march for miles and days carrying their bronze helmets, breastplates, greaves, swords, spears, shields, etc. etc., not to mention their packs with food, etc. etc.. Charlie embodies the meaning of 'soldiering on.')

And just as I learned (after 30 or so years) to swim because I had to chase Charlie around the indoor swimming pool, so I've found myself able to keep on going in the heat. I can't say I don't mind it or that I like it (the latter would be an utter lie), but, maybe the ol' genetic make-up is kicking in for me (as it clearly has for Charlie). 

As a result of the latest round of hot 'n' humid walks with Charlie, I'm quite up for my morning rush down John F. Kennedy Boulevard, with the exhaust of buses, beat-up cars, and semis blowing us all in the face (there always seem to be people out and walking and some in suits and many women with hijabs); the trickle-drip of air conditioner condensation from apartments above; and full sun (which does feel intense when there's no trees save some poor scraggly things, under brick apartment buildings built a century ago and not always well up-kept, and workers clearing asbestos and who knows what in a powdery cloud, all amid litter of various sorts, sizes, and quantities). The afternoon rush-walk to get back to Journal Square to take the PATH to Newark and then the train home is a little more, ah, perspiration-inducing, especially with a Bag of Stuff. (Make that, actually, Bags, to 'distribute the weight evenly.') 

Once again, Charlie and our life with him teaches one that one can endure, that one can do, much more than one might have thought.

But I still don't like this heat.

You. Are. Here.

 In A Subarctic Autism Awareness Day Analogy,  Shannon proposes a "new and more appropriate geographic autism analogy" in lieu of Emily Perl Kingsley's Welcome to Holland. That essay, Shannon notes, was written for families with children with Down Syndrome; she proposes 

 Welcome to Yellowknife! 

As Shannon writes:

Receiving a child's autism diagnosis is like living in the world's most wonderful city, San Francisco, then being suddenly informed of your family's relocation to Yellowknife, a busy city in Canada's subarctic. Even parents who know only that the subarctic is where the globe turns from green to white are aware it's not a place one lives casually. If you're going to survive the long, dark, fierce winters and bug-ridden summers, you have to be prepared. You have to budget for expensive supplies and services that people in San Francisco never need consider. Yellowknife is also remote -- you may find that not all of your former families and friends are able to visit you there.

Living in Yellowknife can be exhilarating, it can by trying, it can be depressing, and it may just fill your soul with light.

I find Shannon's Yellowknife indeed to be a "more appropriate geographic autism analogy." I referenced the Welcome to Holland essay in a pre-autism awareness month post (Yes, We Are the Weird Ones); that essay and Shannon's post got me to think about how much I'm drawn to metaphors of geography and travel and to images of places and spaces in writing about what it's like to be the mother of an autistic son. In an earlier incarnation, this blog was called Autismland, a term coined by Jim to describe to the "country of difference" (another of his wordsmithings) that we've found ourselves journeying through with Charlie.

I like the notion of that journey being in the subarctic climes of Yellowknife, rather than the temperate setting of northern California. San Francisco is great though it always has a bit of an Oz-like quality to me. In Cantonese, San Francisco is Jiow Jin Shan, the Old Gold Mountain and this name, and the Golden Gate Bridge, have always made me think that the city across the bay has something magical, glittering, gleaming about it.

Yes, SF's the city across the bay to me. I was born in Oakland which, even with a newer population of dot-comers and urban farmers, remains a grittier, more workaday kind of place. I haven't lived in California since 1986, when I went to college here in New Jersey, but I like to say that "I'm originally from Oakland." We've moved around a bit, in Missouri (Charlie's place o' birth) and Minnesota (where I got my first tenure-track job), and came back to New Jersey in June of 2001. Jim's a native and Charlie's lived here the longest of the places he's been and I do feel very at home here in the Garden State but still something of a foreigner: I've no Jersey accent to speak of (Jim tells me he still hears traces of "California Valley Girl" though he's fully aware I'm from the northern part of the state). My wardrobe tends towards (very un-Hudson County-like) earth tones with a dash of Berkeley bohemia/natural fibers/handmade and nary a high heel---I don't do malls---and the last time anyone in this household wore make-up was when Jim did his Channel 13-WNET interview. I never can seem to get the phrasing right when ordering a pizza over the phone. And on the rare occasions when I get my hair cut, I'm always the only person not getting highlights or a manicure/pedicure. 

The Garden State is something of a Yellowknife, for me, at least.

One does learn to adapt, by force of circumstance. The two ways in which I've gone beyond myself and approached a bit of Jersey-girl-ness (according to Jim) are: # 1, acute love of the Jersey Shore and the beautiful ocean and #2, decent and ever-expanding ability to drive anywhere and everywhere in New Jersey.

Indeed, forget your images of sun-kissed California girls bronzing on the beach. Many members of my family are not big beach-goers and, too, cannot swim. (I learned in an indoor pool right here in our town, while chasing after Charlie on cold winter nights.) And that golden image of Golden State teenagers cruising around on lazy summer nights? Definitely not me. I got my driver's license after I graduated from high school and never really learned to drive until I finished graduate school, with Jim giving me kindly encouragement. 

But I really learned to drive when I had to take Charlie to this and that doctor an hour away. While I used always have to have my route (every turn, every street) mapped out from A to Z, I was forced to learn how to improvise by scooting onto side streets and local roads when there was a traffic jam on the highway; Charlie prefers to be in motion and better, yes, to be moving with him scanning strange streets than twitching and moaning on finding himself stuck in a stationary car, behind many other such cars.

Yesterday after I picked up Charlie from school, he told me "that way" and pointed right out the parking lot of his school. We headed towards the central Jersey town we used to live in and then, with Charlie pointing me one way, I decided to get creative (and to not end up doing exactly the same route we did twice last week while he was on Spring Break) and took a road that I was pretty sure led to a certain central Jersey college town. I was right, though it took awhile to get there; a call from Jim and the GoogleMaps app on my iPhone assured me that we were headed towards a road I knew. Charlie was starting to look concerned in the back seat but once we were on the highway he got more relaxed. And once we got back on the Garden State Parkway, I for one knew I could always find my way home.

While very glad to be back at school, Charlie has not had a mellifluous re-entry. Being back in school means being back among a lot of other people (students, teachers, therapists, staff) and not just Jim and me; among other voices, sounds, expectations, responsibilities. Again, it's a matter of being now in one place, and then finding oneself in quite a different one, and managing the cognitive dissonance.

Sort of like, perhaps, when (on Monday) I went to an Asian food store and asked for two jien duey. The woman at the bakery counter said something in Chinese---Mandarin, Cantonese, I couldn't tell---to me and I could't figure it out at all, or what to say; I can usually at least understand a basic question, if not respond in Chinese. Talking to Jim, I realized that I'd had my ear tuned to hear modern Greek, as that's the language I've been trying to learn. 

Welcome to Yellowknife.

To Autismland.

Back Into It All in New Jersey

Ngin Ngin's seven great-grandchildren---Charlie is the second youngest---were a big focus at her funeral. Five of them (the youngest is a toddler) all came up to the lectern at the funeral home and read a biography of her life. As I listened to them, I thought of what Charlie might have done had he been there: Jim and/or I would most likely have been standing beside him, and he would not have read. But presence counts for more than a lot.

Charlie just about a week younger than one of his second cousins (my first cousin's cousins). Until the birth of youngest great-grandchild about two years ago, he was the six great-grandchildren. While the three of us only visit California once a year, during Christmas, my relatives seek to include Charlie as much as is possible. In lieu of flowers for Ngin Ngin, my family had put down two organizations to which people could donate money. One was (at my request) the Friends of Children with Special Needs, which was started by a Chinese American family with an autistic child. Indeed, my mom and dad met with the center's director last week to discuss setting up a fund "in memory of Lee Chew for Charlie Fisher."

I've been fortunate to have met a couple of families with kids like Charlie in California; I've always liked to keep up with services, programs, and the like in my native state. Jim and I have often discussed the possibility of getting ourselves out to California by the time Charlie is an adult, as Charlie has no siblings and he'll need family around to support him as much as might be possible when he is older.

I'll be honest that our recent experience in finding an appropriate school for Charlie has shaken our sense of how much New Jersey can offer Charlie. Jim and I specifically moved back to Jersey in 2001 so that Charlie could attend an autism program here. Some years and schools have indeed been great---and some not. Jim often reminds me that there's "no geographical cure": Perhaps the lesson to take from the past year of struggle and uncertainty is to remember this phrase, and the importance of doing things---of teaching---Charlie ourselves.

In light of all this I've been reflecting on recent initiatives about autism in New Jersey. 

Sunlight and Rain

After flying into San Francisco at 10.30pm on Friday night, I stayed up till 2am talking to my parents. Saturday the sun shone warm (temps in the 70s) on a beautiful day in Oakland. I want to say more about the service for Ngin Ngin. I've just a few more hours visiting my parents here in their house and want to get in some more chat of the live kind, so this post will be brief. (No. my parents are not on Facebook.) (Yet.) 

The photo shows where we all said our final good-byes to Ngin Ngin, up on a mountain in the cemetery. From here, you look out over the San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, and beyond to the Pacific Ocean, all the way back to China. 

I had woken up at 6am PST (=9am EST) and, when I talked to Jim at 7.15am/10.15am, found out that he and Charlie had already been on a bike ride, breakfasted on bagels, and gotten completely soaked in a freezing rain on the way back.  

Can I say this boy's got something in him---some kind of spirit, some kind of spunk? Charlie did not complain or whine on what must have been a cold (to say the least) and rugged ride back home, and I'm not saying that just because Charlie's language is limited. On his bike with Jim, Charlie knows he's going to get where he needs to; knows he can get home no matter what the weather.

Back to the Old Gold Mountain

Charlie has been accepted into the big autism center. We will be meeting with the director and Charlie's case manager next week.

I learned about this when I checked the voice mail on my office phone as Jim was driving Charlie and me for a quick diner dinner. I was due at the Newark Airport for a 7.05pm flight to San Francisco: Ngin Ngin's funeral is 9am this Saturday morning. Afterwards she will be laid to rest beside Yeh Yeh, my grandfather, on a mountain that looks west towards the San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and (as my dad has so often said to me) all the way back to China.

We didn't dawdle at the diner. It's become wintry in New Jersey, with a cold rain. Not sure if Jim and Charlie will be able to make it out on their bikes this weekend while I'm gone, let alone kayak (though Jim noted that, should Charlie call out "kayak, yes," they will likely " be the twosome in the only vessel bobbling through choppy Barnegat Bay").

San Francisco, where I flew into around 10.30pm, was known as Old Gold Mountain to the Chinese who emigrated from Toisan in Guangdong Province. That's where Ngin Ngin and Yeh Yeh were from; that's where, in a kind of ultimate way, I'm from. San Francisco got that moniker because the Chinese who came over were, like so many others, in search of gold and riches (California was also called "Gold Mountain"). They didn't exactly find gold: Many found more hardship, and loneliness, and sorrow, and suffering, than they might ever have imagined---and many struggled through it all, and (like Ngin Ngin and Yeh Yeh) made it, though the road was often rough and rocky.

I guess you could say we've been on a similar road so often in our life with Charlie. When times get tough (as they have been), it goes without saying, it helps me a lot to think of what Ngin Ngin and Yeh Yeh endured. There are times when I know that Jim and I just need to put our heads down, set our shoulders straight, and keep pushing, keep plodding, onward.

As I got out of the car at the airport, Charlie looked at Jim and me and said "No. No." I opened the back door and gave him a fast kiss and one to Jim, and grabbed my bags. I'll be back with them tomorrow, Sunday morning; back on the long road together.

I can hardly wait: Life with my best friends of us is just too good to miss.

Time Zone Travel (#559)

"Turnahn musix!" Charlie called as soon as we got into the black car at the Philadelphia Airport. He had been singing a certain lilting fragment on and off in the last hour of our flight back from California: I flipped through the CD case but could not find Charlie's request. I pulled out a purple paisley-decorated disc: "Jimi Hendrix?"

"Hendricks, yes," said Charlie and he sat straight up on his knees, beaming. Suddenly lines of white light and sparkling circles burst out in front of us from Lincoln Financial Field, where the Philadelphia Eagles were about to play the Atlanta Falcons. Charlie's head kept turning from side to side as we drove past Citizens Bank Park where we had seen the Phillies play back in July, past downtown Philadelphia, and, after a ways, past the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, Palmyra being where Jim's best friend Mike who died almost three years ago had last lived: Another sentimental journey.

It's always a journey in Autismland, every day, is it not----I turn around to glance at Charlie in the backseat and still see the big baby whose wet, black-eyed head I first beheld more than 9 1/2 years ago in a room at the Missouri Baptist Medical Center, and then see those same eyes narrowing as Charlie concentrates on "Little Wing." And maybe because, as the parent of a disabled child, one tends to think about "big questions"---"what will happen when Charlie is retirement age?"---all the time, one often feels that one is traveling at least two different time zones, and when to sleep, or when to start brewing the morning coffee, is hard to tell.

Charlie's sleep habits have been so erratic for the month of December---staying up regularly until 1 or 2 am, taking a several hours' nap at school---that I figured going to the West Coast and being on Pacific Standard Time, three hours "behind" time in New Jersey, would wreak further havoc on his biological clock, and that is indeed the case. It is 2.30am here in New Jersey (11pm back in California) and Charlie is completely wide awake and speaking a steady stream of words or syllables. (Tuesday morning, when he goes back to school, is going to be interesting.) Charlie could not sleep at all yesterday; I know he knew it was his last night in California and he was awake till 1am.

This worked out to his advantage as far as air travel: Charlie, roused at 5.30am, went right back to sleep during our 7.15am flight and only awoke in the last hour and a half. I have accordingly become convinced that the best times to fly with an autistic child, or at least with my autistic child, are in the evening on a red-eye flight when one's child has had a full day and is glad to sit, or at the crack of dawn, when one's child can promptly go back to sleep. If there is one lesson I have learned from all these days and years with Charlie----and as it is 2007 and Charlie was born in 1997, I can start speaking of a decade with Charlie---it is that you do what you gotta do to keep him happy, yourself more or less calm, and so be it.

On the plane, a 5-month-old cried and wailed; Jim and I thought: "We've heard louder." Across the aisle, a black warm-up clad Asian mother passed a steady stream of bagels, muffins, cream cheese, and juice to her three children in the row before her (they also had DVDs, Bratz dolls, and a Game Boy), while attending to a preschool-age boy: When you're traveling, it helps to keep everyone content with creature comforts.

That might not be bad advice when you're getting ready for another year's journey in Autismland.

Wishing all of our Autismland friends and family a New Year of peace and joy, learning and loving, and witness and hope.

(And, around here, not a lot of sleep: I, as you may have gathered, need only a few hours, and I think Charlie is following suit.)

What Happened to Us in 2006 (#558)

We spent our last afternoon in California walking down by the bay in Berkeley, where my mother recalled childhood camping trips with her father and siblings (sleeping under the stars because my grandfather preferred to camp tentfree, hiking while carrying the sleeping bags, and eating pork 'n' beans kept cool while tethered to a rock in the river), and eating one more dinner in Oakland's Chinatown with assorted members of my family, including my Ngin Ngin. Walking down 8th Street my father reminicised about his father (my Yeh Yeh)'s store, Tai Wah, and how two of my aunts (who enjoyed being "two little old ladies" in New York City when they attended Witness and Hope, the October 27th autism conference) had, once upon a time in their girlhood, taken the bus from their West Oakland apartment to Chinatown to open up Tai Wah so Yeh Yeh could get some rest.

It has been more than a year since I was in California. Last Christmas, we just could not make the trip. Charlie had just started at a new private autism school and, while he liked it, it was not the time to embark on a transcontinental ride of a few hours 10,000 feet up. It was the first time since I went away to college twenty years ago that I have not come back to California for the holidays.

The last time we came out here for Christmas in 2004, Charlie came down on Christmas Eve with a raging stomach flu and spent all but the last day curled up on the couch while my mom hurried around doing laundry. (The trip had not started on a high note exactly: Jim and I had picked up Charlie from school with rug burn on his forehead, after he got upset during library.) Little did we know that the beginning of 2005----when Charlie started to have major behavior and therefore learning trouble in his public school program---would put us on a path that led to our taking him out of school for a month one November day and leaving our house for my in-laws' basement and a school Charlie likes so much that mention of his teacher and aides yesterday evoked an eager tone in his voice.

From the ride on the airplane on December 23rd, to a visit to an autism center, offering incense at a Buddhist temple, biking to the ocean in Golden Gate Park, and walking across the Golden Gate Bridge---and one day of post-holiday holiday ache (because in Autismland, a week of great days is not the same without one tougher day)---it has been a great week.

But I think the greatest moment came this evening.

Charlie had showered and was sneaking out clementines from the refrigerator. "Photos, turn on!" he called to me, to see the photo slideshow on this computer. I took this as a possible sign that Charlie might be okay about leaving California tomorow, after him frowning and making whining sort of sounds when we showed him his calendar/picture schedule and talked about "going to Grandpa's house"; Charlie usually watches this photo show on school nights and associates it (I think) with being home in New Jersey.

"PoPo!" Charlie called and turned his head towards the kitchen, where my mother was. "PoPo! Sit!"

Charlie pulled over his chair towards the computer screen and touched the chair beside him.

I think he was asking my mother to watch his photo show with him, which she did.

The experts call this "joint attention."

I call it, Charlie, you've come so very far and I can't even see where you might be going.

People & Heights & Water (#557)

Those are three of Charlie's favorite things, all provided courtesy of the Golden Gate Bridge.

People: On a day of upper 50s temperatures, two days before the end of the year, the small, angular-shaped parking lot beside the bridge was packed. A tour guide read aloud an explanatory plaque in Mandarin as 15 tourists took photos of it. Asian women with their hair color ranging from golden orange to black strolled up the path to the bridge in suede boots with handbags under arms, or gripping small children's hands. Three cyclists, the oldest women speaking a Scandinavian language, carefully passed us. Several generations of a Latino family walked by, the youngest girl wearing a fleece hat, a fleece hood, and a pink scarf in the shape of a rabbit.

Charlie (once he had shaken off the last bit of sleep from a car nap) kept stopping, arms stiff in front of his body and his sleeves pulled over his hands. He was looking in the distance, at all those someones moving beneath the rust-red beams of the bridge.

Heights. Ever since he was a toddler and Jim took Charlie for regular walks across the Selby Avenue bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota, we have noted that there is something about being on a bridge that appeals to Charlie.

Charlie has bridges in the blood: My mother's father was a bridge inspector, a job requiring him to walk atop the Golden Gate and bridges up and down the state of California. This afternoon we all got a good look from the bottom up at those mighty girders, seemingly so stable and yet swaying in the wind coming off the Pacific.

Again and again, Charlie ran to look down towards the water, and I think the view from the bridge's top would intrigue him no less.

(It is also the case that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers were Charlie's favorite to watch when he went to the circus.)

It took about forty minutes to walk across and then back over the bridge. Noise was constant from a couple of lanes of traffic; to our right and then our left was the kind of vista postcards are made of: a lean triangle with San Francisco's skyscrapers and Victorian houses planted on it; a far longer, bigger wedge, with the East Bay where my parents lives; and in the middle Alcatraz and also Angel Island, where my grandmother Ngin-Ngin was interned for some months before setting food in America back in the 1920s.

"Go-denn gayt....brijjjj!"

Water. It was splashing a long drop below, and it was pale jade green.

Charlie, as has been regularly noted on this blog, is a boy who loves the water. Swimming in ocean waves is his preferred way of interacting with the water, but swimming pools can alike be places of liquid delight and visiting an aquarium is pretty good, too. And being over the water while on a bridge.

Charlie has his share of trouble with transitions and I find it somewhat counterintuitive that he should seem so home upon a bridge, which is a sort of transitional structure, a way to go from one place to the next (metaphorically as well as actually). And yet his face and the skip in his step said that Charlie was peaceful easy-feeling and downright perky, too.

Perhaps being on a bridge----in wind and water and dry land and air all simultaneously---is not a transitional spot for Charlie. Perhaps the symbolic, cliché meaning of bridges is nothing to Charlie.

Perhaps a bridge is just home and where he needs to be.

Under the Smile of Kwan Yin (#556)

Kwan Yin is the Buddhist goddess of love and mercy and---as my father told me so long ago I can't remember when---the favorite goddess of my grandmother Ngin-Ngin. And, as long as I can remember, there has been a white ceramic statue of Kwan Yin in her house, each finger and rustle of her robes and lotus petal carefully sculpted and needing a good wipe of the dust cloth (as I also remember from the times when my sister and I helped to clean Ngin-Ngin's house).

Charlie, my dad's arm around him, bowed before Kwan Yin today, in the temple of the Ching Chung Taoist Association of America on the edge of San Francisco's Chinatown, across the street from Old Saint Mary's Cathedral at the intersection of Grant and California streets and right amid San Francisco's famous straight-up-and-down hills. Charlie ran out of the car and up the steep slope, full of happy energy.

After attending Witness and Hope, the October 27th NYC autism advocacy conference, one of aunts had asked about taking Charlie to a Buddhist temple to bow before his ancestors and, specifically, my grandfather Yeh Yeh, who died in 1975. We met her and another one of my aunts and a cousin who is just around Charlie's age and took the elevator up to the temple, which occupies a few rooms on the fourth floor above various Chinatown businesses. Red was the predominant color, with gold filigree gleaming throughout, small pyramid piles of pears and apples for the gods, and statues of the gods. The sweet stuffy smell of incense filled the air.

We went into a room whose walls were lined in white rectangular tiles and up near the ceiling was one with Yeh Yeh's photos as I always remember him, and of a much younger Ngin Ngin---the matriarch who chopped squid or chicken backs or bundles of choy with fearless whacks of her cleaver on a round cutting board and who regularly cooked endless amounts of dishes for family dinners that my cousins and I ate on TV trays while watching Hogan's Heroes or Love American Style. "You light the heng here," my dad said as he took three sticks of incense and, standing behind Charlie, lit them, and they bowed three times together.

"Happy Birday two-you, hah-pee bir-day two-you," sang Charlie.

"The heng are like candles, they are," I said, and Charlie sang again when we burned more to Kwan Yin's statue with its gentle smile.

Charlie was smiling too, digging into rice and sweet and sour pork as his cousin sipped her bubble tea, and then as we walked the streets of Chinatown. My aunt had bought a Chinese New Year's decoration with a gaudily colored lion's head for Charlie's cousin to bring to school and I wanted to get one for Charlie's class, too. As I located one in a store selling stationery and red envelopes--hong bao---Charlie ran into the middle of the store, bent over double at the waist, and made what I'll call a lion cub-esque noise that had the effect of bringing startled (maybe shocked) looks onto the faces of employees and shoppers.

It was a "he has autism" moment that I let pass. I think the room went silent but I could not hear it----those mini-roars (usually part of some script in Charlie's mind) have become so much a part of the course of a day's conversation with Charlie. I walked over to him and showed him the lion's head decoration: "We can give it to your teacher!" I said, as business sort of resumed among the disoriented onlookers.

In Autismland, strange and unstrange are relative---or, as I like to think of it, when you are raising an autistic child, the strange becomes unstrange---no longer "abnormal" or "bizarre" or "odd" or "mysterious"---and, very often, sometimes a thing of awe. And time and again what I learn from being Charlie's mother is that what seems quite unsurprising to me, is strange and beyond to him.

We drove to Golden Gate Park and rented bikes and helmets for my dad, Jim, and Charlie, who immediately looked worried when a helmet (not his) and a bike (not his) were presented to him (only now does it occur to me, when we told Charlie we were going to "ride bikes," he may well have expected that his bike and bike helmet were going to appear here in northern California, magically transported from Grandpa's New Jersey garage). Jim and Charlie rode off with my dad behind. An hour plus later, I heard a stream of vowel sounds coming from a familiar voice, saw my dad and then Charlie riding strong, Jim beside him.

"We rode to the ocean," Jim proclaimed, "and he did--not--like--it." Because, Jim noted quietly, the ocean holds a whole set of associations for Charlie and they do not involve biking in December with Gong Gong, waves so huge that signs on the beach warn "people have died here," and Charlie in his winter coat and socks:

Nothing looked so strange to Charlie this afternoon as that Pacific Ocean and several beachcomber walkers, clad in polarfleece and sweaters.

In the car crossing the Bay Bridge, Jim compared the scene of Charlie encountering an ocean he was not expecting to "Lewis and Clark and Charlie." (After all, Christopher Columbus was not expecting to find "America" when he landed in 1492.........) "Hey Cholly, what was that ocean you saw?" Jim said.

"Pahzihixx oshun," said Charlie. And then "wah-ermelon, wahtermeh'on, I want eat wahtermeh'on!"

My parents made sure to stop at the grocery store for some, and my mom quickly cut up the big chunks into smaller pieces: "Not so fast, sweetie!" she said as Charlie all but gulped the pink mush down. He washed his hands, endured her washing his face, and stomped happily off to practice at his new keyboard and then to dine on Chinese food with his great-great-uncle.

Burning heng for Yeh Ye and Kwan Yin, riding bikes in San Francisco, sighting the Pacific in December---the unexpected becoming the I've-done-that: One day's mission (of mercy, of love) accomplished in Autismland.