A Boy Of All Seasons

It's -3 Celsius today so Charlie is poised to show that, yes, he did spend some formative years in St. Paul, Minnesota (from 1998-2000 -- he was diagnosed with autism there and started his education with his deeply remembered, much-lauded first team of therapists) and is in the habit of saying his equivalent of, weather be what it is, I ride.

He was born in St. Louis, Missouri -- ok, the hospital was actually in a suburb called Town and Country -- and, as revealed by successive summers of biking in temperatures in the high 30-degrees Celsius and up,  he can also take the hot, hot, heat.

Charlie is still wearing, under that one long-sleeved light-blue shirt, the same turquoise-teal short-sleeved shirt he happened to be wearing the last day of summer school back in August. He has insisted on wearing it every day since then on his local bike ride, with an obligatory staying-still spell in front of the entranceway to a nearby bank.

I know he has his reasons for doing what, to the casual observer, is pretty odd/bizarre/even crazy behavior. Certainly Charlie is making a statement about his preference that things, or least some things he can control, remain always the same; for a kind of permance in chang, for 'Dauer in Wechsel,' as Goethe put it in his poem.

In so many ways, that seeking the always in the ever-changing course of life is Charlie's daily existential struggle vis-a-vis the world, no?