We Go With Him

It's Always the Future Active Participle Around Here

After sleeping long and sound on Saturday and Sunday night, it wasn't surprising that Charlie was awake past midnight on Monday. He'd been tired at school but still had a good day. The sky had been gray and portending rain (and raining some) but he and Jim completed all the twelve miles of their bike ride.

He was just this bit on edge as we drove to get some groceries; perhaps because last week the store had been out of his preferred type of crackers in the red box?

I ran ahead and saw some boxes on the shelf above the frozen desserts. Charlie smiled to see them too and the rest of the evening was full of munching, walking, running, music.

The Kinks were playing as midnight neared and I was trying to get my mind in gear to write about jobs for autistics. There was a loud noise, the too-familiar sound that some piece of furniture had been overturned. I ran up the stairs, Jim came up too, Charlie sat on his bed staring a bit blankly. Five minutes passed and he suddenly zoomed down the stairs and overturned a box of books.

For 45 minutes he sat in the brown chair and started to doze off, then went up to his room and then came almost an hour of transitioning him from on-the-verge-of-upsetment* to something calmer. Nothing else flew, there was no banging of heads or iPads. I did offer Charlie an apple slice or two. Jim gave him a shave. Jim went downstairs and typed an email. I sat on the blue couch and read about the singer of tales.

Charlie called several times for my parents, Gong Gong and Po Po: Of course he is all anticipation, as we ourselves have anticipated. We looked at the calendar and counted off the days till Saturday when they arrive.

In the interest of getting him a bit of sleep before the bus comes -- he is quite awake at 2am -- I am signing off. I will write that story about autistics and jobs on Tuesday -- a topic very close to our thoughts all the time. Charlie has been saying 'bus' and much hangs on his knowing that it is coming at 7.40am and the day it does not, we have to be ready.

Update, 7.55am. Charlie went to sleep at 4am. Hopped up like a rabbit at 7.40 when Jim told him the bus was here.

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*Excitaturus -- a future active participle -- in Latin.

 

Orality and Literacy and the Homeric Question

This is really more of a note to myself. In the midst of routine posting about disablity rights, IDEA, the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests, Charlie's and Jim's bike-capades and running reasonably fast for a 43-year-old mother down the street after our boy (not because, as some people think, he is running away, but because he has a beautiful bow-legged stride and Jim and are sending repeated requests to Special Olympics and Charlie is learning the joy of running as I did at his age) -- I think, after many years and abstracts for panel presentations that never became papers and lesson-planning about Latin declensions and Greek participles and grading papers and quizzes, that I have found a research focus. 

The Homeric Question and orality and literacy, informed by research about the communication and language of individuals with speech disabilities -- who are non- are minimally verbal -- who do not read (in our text-based society) -- and how music and metaphorical language and memory play a part.

I'm refining this focus and also starting to read the mountain of scholarship -- Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Greg Nagy, Adam Parry, Nietsche -- on this huge topic. 

Another Incident In This Odyssey

 

This was the first truly cold weekend of the winter and Jim and I talked about a shorter ride in Jersey horse country. We were driving when Charlie started rocking, his torso moving extremely fast while the Replacements played.

Then he turned on an old Barney album, still with the vigorous swaying.

Then on the highway he grabbed my arm, Jim's arm, Jim's hand, Jim pulled over, Charlie hit his head on the backs of the seats.

I reached back and took the iPad and turned it off and it stayed at my feet as Jim got back in the car and got off the highway and turned the car back east towards home. Charlie cried most of the way and called for his iPad which I only handed back to him after we were home and the Replacements had been deleted.

We thought of the great ride at the ocean on Saturday and how Charlie had persevered through a stressful week. There must be some lag? Maybe he was worried that this would be another week in which Jim would go somewhere, despite all assurances that such would not happen?

Charlie slept some in his chair and then woke and wanted a bike ride, pronto. I was making chicken and rice and heating up some fish sticks and said, how about lunch at home first? Charlie munched apples and tried some chicken and fish sticks -- slowly but surely, he is eating some different foods -- and was ready for a bike ride around 2.30pm.

It was cold and the wind blew, and there were a few snow flurries. It hasn't been made the wintriest of winters, but this Sunday surely felt like it and Charlie, after some dinner, watched me seriously as I cut up a watermelon and then went to bed at 6pm.

We heard him coughing some three hours later and saying 'tickle Mom,' meaning that he wanted me ('tickle' is a vestigial phrase from when he said that word to ask for us to 'come and tickle him'). I found him, eyes closed.

'Plug in,' said Charlie, gesturing a bit towards the wall where the cord to his iPad is. I got the cord and plugged in the iPad (on Charlie's bed) and told him I loved him and good night.

His IEP last Friday was good though poignant, the conversation a mix of talking about his progress and how he does at some point learn things we had thought he wouldn't; discussing preventative measures for really serious behaviors; learning that, when Charlie turns 21, he will finish out the school year in June and then, hello, very different, perhaps harsh world of adult services in which the word is not 'entitlement' but 'eligibility.'

In other words, planning for the future starts now (it's already started) even as we address the challenges of each day.

To stay focused, reasonably calm and avoid feelings of 'oh so now that we've got the school piece figured out such that we have completely cordial, informative, productive IEP meetings in which we feel we're all part of Team Charlie -- now it'll be all over in six years and then....' -- I've been (besides the inevitable researchings, phone calls, inquires about 'everything after your child ages out') memorizing the first 10 lines of Homer's Odyssey.

 

Note on the Odyssey, Book 1, line 6

 

Jim is writing his speech as I type this; Charlie -- who had one of those great days of school and a great bike ride and a surprisingly long walk during which he stopped to investigate every slanted crack in the sidewalk and a second short one during he just kept moving -- our boy is up past midnight. There is a full moon; there is a barometric change in the air (snow is supposed to fall on Wednesday); there is the fact that Jim is going to Boston and won't be back till Thursday. !!!

Rather fitting that I'm prepping to teach Homer's Odyssey, an epic poem about a hero who has numerous adventures and struggles and wanderings before returning home after 20 years, to two of Jim's classes.

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Shortly after I posted the above, Charlie asked for a walk and, knowing about his anxiety at Jim's impending trip, we thought it all right and all three went. After not five minutes, Charlie started crying as we walked down our street and then, after turning a corner, hit his head on a tree. Getting back home took over a half-hour and was a full-loaded, painful struggle during which, among much else, I lost my glasses in the street.

We held onto Charlie to get back home and had him sit in the brown chair and then, for some minutes, we all sat. αλλ' ουδ' ως εταρους ερρυσατο, ιεμενος περ, 'but not even did he bring his companions out of danger, yearning indeed,' said the book I'd left open on the couch.

But we did get him back home.

 

Cornel West and the Greeks and Catastrophe

We put Charlie on the bus then it was into the white car and Jim drove me down to Philadelphia where I spent the day in the Marriott Hotel at the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association. This meant that I spent the day listening to academics talking about 19th-century African-Americans who had been educated in Classics and were  (like Cicero) powerful wielders of rhetoric; about the tensions and ambivalences amongst those of us who are Classicists but from different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, perspectives; about the use of Sophocles' Antigone in a play about the murdered women in Ciudad Juárez; about teaching pedagogy to Classics graduate students, a topic that led me (how could I not) to ask about what is done to prepare students to teach undergraduates with learning disabilities, ADHD, Asperger's; about ancient mosaics and vase paintings of Dionysius (to consider the question, does the wine god ever actually drink wine and get drunk in ancient depictions of him), a particularly splendid mosaic depicting the end of the 12th book of the Aeneid showing Turnus dropping his weapons before Aeneas, and a consideration of domed ceilings in ancient architecture vs. being under the sky outside.

Along the way, one panelist said words to the effect that there is something about Classicists and -- having (she didn't say that, I suspicioned it) -- Asperger's. 

In the morning, Dr. Cornel West was on a six-person panel about two books, one on classical themes in African American literature and one on Afro-Greeks, on classical influences and education on Caribbean writers. Dr. West is (among much else) a philosopher, but not a classicist (he did rock a little in his seat, and another presenter who writes about the classical tradition kept swaying and stepping about at the lectern just like someone else I know who can't speak while standing still). And then Dr. West said that he goes back to the Greeks because they understand catastrophe.

What is Greek tragedy but, to quote the title of a book I read in my undergraduate days, catastrophe averted? And there is plenty of it in Greek comedy, lyric poetry about love, Greek history (the plague, the defeats, the Greeks taken prisoner after the disastrous Sicilian expedition in Thucydides' account of the Peloponessian War).

Dr. West was talking about the ugly legacies of colonialism.

I had my phone in my right hand and I looked at it and saw the number for Charlie's school. 

The ringer was off and I stepped out of the hotel ballroom and heard the voicemail: Our smiling, waving from the bus window boy had had two very difficult moments, one in the morning and one at lunch, but was ok, said the reassuring voice of Charlie's teacher. I texted Jim to call Charlie's school to talk to his teacher and Jim did so right away and I went back to my seat in the second row and heard the tail end of Dr. West's words.

Later on, I found what I think will be the textbook for next fall's ancient Greek class. It is nothing splashy: A facsimile of the turn of the century schoolboy text I learnt Greek from in a smudged xerox copy.  It has just the basics. I also found a reader too with sentences on sentences, and some laminated cards that have all (well, all the basics) of ancient Greek grammar on them. So you can carry it with you everywhere!

If you're not already carrying it with you always in your head after studying it for 30 years.

Progress Happens When You're Not Looking

 

Friday was my last day of teaching;no chalkboards for a while after this. Charlie was much cheerier Thursday and Friday, in contrast to the start of the week. And, I had a wonderful parent-teacher conference Thursday: Charlie's progress learning is quite gradual, but he does make gains and, in speaking to the speech therapist and teachers I realized how much. Last year he was having a lot of confusion about using 'yes' and 'no'; the speech therapist noted that was no issue for him and, as she did, it occurred to me that Charlie has been having much less trouble with those words to the extent that I had forgotten he was.

 

Thoughts About Heroes

 

It was not intentional, but I showed a clip from Disney's Dumbo to my mythology class on Tuesday.

We have been studying the concept of a hero in ancient literature, Joseph Campbell's outline of the hero's journey, heroes and trickster figures (Ananzi the spider -- I still remember hearing a librarian read us a story about him when I was in perhaps the second grade -- and Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and hiding it in a hollow fennel bulb). I mentioned Hercules and somehow the Disney movie about that Greek hero came up and then we talked about him having great abilities that he most awkwardly and sometimes disastrously has no idea what to do with, but that he slowly learns to use, and that got us to Dumbo.

Should you ever have the chance to watch either cartoon, note how the words 'freak' and not 'normal' get thrown about.

Certainly, heroes in ancient literature aren't perfect, physically and otherwise. Oedipus, for instance: His name Οιδιπους actually means 'swollen foot' (he is lamed as a baby and then exposed in the wilderness). Unlike the protagonists of Disney cartoons who by and large overcome their weaknesses and difficulties, heroes in ancient literature often end up in even more difficult straits, with sometimes -- often --tragic fates.

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Charlie woke before 6am on Tuesday and waited easily for the bus with Jim as I'd gone to catch the train. The schoolday still saw its share of on and off crying. Charlie was somber getting off the bus and slow on a bike ride with Jim. Then he went straight to bed and slept from just before 7pm to 11.30pm.

The change to regular time has been another thing bedeviling Charlie and getting his sleep times very out of whack. His body clock is still on daylight savings time and the changes in the light have been unsettling, on top of all the other unsettledness. I've been noting more and more how sensitive and attuned Charlie is to changes in the light. On our evening walks, he moves confidently and easily; we have been thinking he has some night vision that enables him to see or at least sense more than most of us do or can.

 

On Ritualistic Behavior

On the agenda for Tuesday's mythology class is a discussion of ritual (in an anthropological and in a religious sense) and some of the Homeric Hymns (to Demeter -- one of my favorites -- to Hermes, to Apollo).

Every time I read the word "ritual," I keep thinking "ritualistic behavior," as in the way Charlie matches shoe with shoe and then places several pairs in neat formations according to the wooden floorboards of the first floor of our house. Or the care with which he adjusts the belt on his pants (granted, many of my male students take equal care with catching the precisely right droop of the drawers; Charlie, though, is not in it for style). Or the way that, on an evening run-walk, he paused in his sprint to tap his left food on the half-oval of pavement on a stretch of sidewalk, then again ran with breakneck speed.

Jim and I know now, through much and often harsh experience, that Charlie needs to have such rituals to help him hang on in a world full of more change and variation than he can easily stomach. But we also know, through equally tough moments, that let the ritualisticness persist too long and Charlie gets himself caught in a box that he is (sometimes literally) banging his head and biting his way to get out of.

Though his ability to function according to ritual and routine can be a plus. Still sniffling, Charlie woke at 4am on Monday, showered, got dressed, wanted a walk. We suggested waiting till it was bright and he assented and went back to sleep -- and dragged himself out of bed at 7.20am to make it on the school bus.

Of course, after Jim got home, there was a dad 'n' son bike ride, too.

 

Gods of Water and Sky Have Stopped Here

I'm reading Enuma Elish for my Friday mythology class and thinking about the primeval goddess Tiamut, 'watery chaos' -- that's certainly what you could call what happened in our town a few weeks ago courtesy of Hurricane Irene. Yesterday Charlie and I saw township trucks and workers scooping up debris -- sofas, old stuffed animals, a stroller, drawers, washing machines -- that's been moldering in the front yards of people whose houses were flooded by the river that runs through the center of our town.

Water has often gotten special mention here on this blog, as Charlie loves swimming in it, loves water, so. After his anxiety about leaving the beach peaked in late July and early August, Jim and I decided a beach break was in order and Charlie, while eager for bike ride on bike ride, has not asked for the ocean. I don't think it's that he loves it and the beach any less, but that he wants the ocean to be a certain way -- with big foamy rough waves -- and to swim out as far as he can, beyond where we can go. Not being able to do this, Charlie feels deeply thwarted.

But the ocean is a powerful force you don't mess with. Jim told me that two people were rescued out of the ocean on the Jersey shore Thursday: Rip tides. 

Charlie woke up from a brief nap in the afternoon soon as I said the magic 'bike ride' words. It had rained and become gray and windy, lovely and cool after some humid, heavy-air days. I'd just seen Jim walking towards home from the train and so had said 'the words.'

They did their usual neighborhood rounds and then we all went out in the white car. Turning towards home, we saw a magnificent rainbow leading high up into the sky where some other gods once were thought to be at home.

 

Calling On Hermes

Booming thunder followed by enough rain for a mythical deluge woke Charlie at 5am: Here in New Jersey, it's starting to feel like we're going to need to find an ark, with yet more reports of flooding around the state. The places you see in those photos are precisely where the new trail Jim and Charlie biked on last weekend is (or, after all that rain fell so fast, was).

I'm teaching mythology this semester (one of my favorite subjects). Hearing that thunder Thursday morning got me thinking about Zeus hurling his thunderbolts: He is, after all, a god of the sky.

Charlie plowed through his lunch by 7am and ran around in high giggly style till the bus came. What with the early wake up and the fast ingestion of a lunchbox's worth of food, he lost the chipperness by mid-morning and had not one, but two stormy moments. But he recovered, as his teacher noted to me on the phone in the afternoon.

My mom and dad head back home to California on Friday and we'd predicted Charlie's ensuing anxiety. He enjoyed a sunny bike ride with Jim after days of gray skies and then tried to get my dad to put on his socks and shoes, with the idea of getting him to leave right now so Charlie could get over the good-bye business.

I think I'm going to send some good thoughts up to Hermes, god of (among much else) travelers, and wish us all, whether in the air or on watery roads, safe passage.