The Odd Duck

The recent political events in my country seem to have brought out both the worst and best in us, never more evident than in the way diversity is being either ostracized or embraced. There's as many different forms of weird are there are people, from harmless to ......creepy. I felt especially informed by candidate Kamala Harris' mother's advise about identity: "Never let anyone tell you who you are, you show them who you are." In honor of Gus Walz I'm again sharing my own story…

The Odd Duck

Originally published by the anti-bullying action group, The Ugly Ducklings, LLC. 
@2013 SAWiltse

I set down my packages and settled in to wait for the next homeward bound bus. A fellow commuter stepped back from the curb having searched in vain for some sign of a ride in the distance. As she turned toward me, I became aware that we had something in common. We both had exotopia, one eye that wanders out to the side away from the other, a congenital condition more commonly known as being walleyed. We noticed each other noticing, but she quickly turned away to sit in silence at the opposite end of the same bench. 

I should have paid better attention to her reaction, but curiosity overcame judgment. Not in all of my twenty one or so years had I met anyone else as differently eyed as I was. "We have the same, ahhhh," I offered with a smile, gesturing at my own face and nodding toward hers. 

Don't know what I expected, but it wasn't the instant look of horror and disgust that came over her. She literally screamed, "I don't look... ANYTHING ...LIKE YOU!" Just then a bus did arrive. She didn't even look up to see if it was the right one as she hurried herself onboard. That's how badly she needed to escape, well, someone that really, honestly, did look like her.

My first job out of secretarial college was a much less innocent affair. I was to temp as a receptionist at a prestigious downtown law firm. One of the young associates had just been made a full partner and nearly everyone in the office was getting a promotion because of it. All were in a party mood. That is, until I showed up. The new partner took one look and judged me on looks alone. 

"She can't be on the front desk!" he bellowed.

"Why!?" asked another young man surprised by his reaction. "I'm being made a partner!" 

"So? What does that have to do with..."

"Just... LOOK AT HER!"

 

A secretary gently whisked me away into a small anteroom. She sat me down looking even worse than I felt. We stayed there trying to pretend that I could not hear the insulting, escalating argument that more and more voices were being added to just outside. "I'm sorry. Really. It's... It's... He's just such a jerk." She said, nearly in tears.

Finally, another young man entered and he, too, apologized. "We've found someone else to man the phones," he added, blushing with embarrassment. 

I felt sorry for them, but couldn't hide being hurt. And I damned well was going to get what was my due --a day's work and a day's pay to go with it. "I've been contracted for the day." I stated flatly.

"But we don't have..." He started to say. 

The secretary interrupted, "We do have all the announcements to do. They have to be hand-written."

"Would that be alright?" she asked me.

I wasn't thinking all that well, or I wouldn't have agreed. The joke was on both the legal bigot and me. My strength was a good speaking voice and problem-solving skills. On the other hand, so to speak, my handwriting had always been miserably problematic at the best of times -- uncomfortable, hugely uneven and dyslexic. The job took me the rest of the day, but I did manage to hand-write every envelope for each of the firm's announcements of the "jerk's" new partnership. Each one was a barely legible, tear-stained mess. It was way too arduous and upsetting to have been an intended revenge, but the irony of it was not lost on me even then.

You can't go home after experiences like that one and not look at yourself in a mirror. It could have been worse. I was born cross-eyed. A couple of failed operations very early in life turned an inward turning eye outward instead. Actually, I had just been grateful that an original diagnosis, one that would have had me legally blind by adulthood, had so far been proven wrong. Sight itself didn't change anything or make life any easier, but it did do nicely for a booby prize. Anyways, I was certainly much prettier than the actor Jack Elam, and nowhere near as funny to look at as comic Marty Feldman. I simply looked in two different directions at once. For one reason or another, about 15% of all human beings arrive with some form of stereoblindness, this "strabismus" in common. In some aboriginal societies, it is said that that would show one to be a shaman. Someone who could look into both this world and the next. In still other cultures or in past centuries, I might have found myself discarded at birth, or been burned at the stake for witchcraft. So things could definitely have been worse. 

Not that there isn't still enough shunning and/or bullying to either make or break one's character even to this day. Unlike other more or less invisible challenges, a lack of visual symmetry is as perplexingly obvious as having a different body shape or color skin. But beyond appearances, the lack of stereo sight (and in my own case hearing) is simply another kind of normal. My normal just doesn't happen to live in a three-dimensional version of space; even though I do, however, tend to fall off or bump into it -unfortunately- quite a lot. 

When I was teen-aged I tried to hide this different normal behind a pair of mirrored granny glasses, but something else happened instead. Those mirror lenses turned the tables on family, friends, even strangers who had tended before to absent-mindedly stare trying to figure out whether they were being looked at by one eye or the other. Wearing those sunglasses, I got to watch as people saw reflected what I, myself, saw when I looked at them! Their reactions were pretty revealing. There were people who liked themselves, or didn't. People who could not hold their own gaze, and those that could not ignore it when it stared back at them. How we perceive ourselves turned out to be far more important than how anyone else sees us. 

Today there is a growing acceptance of neurodiversity thanks to the shared life and work of people like Oliver Sacks,  Temple Grandin, Robyn Hussa, and Barbara Arrowsmith Young. More and more different, unique, and/or challenged people are being credited with having their own acceptable kind of normalcy. An "ugly" duckling need not take any form but the one that suits him or her best. Beauty is not about how you wear your feathers. It's about how you use your wings. In that, even the oddest duck can fly like a swan.

An Appreciation of “Mary Poppins Returns”

For my friend Karen: 

I missed my Gram. I could still sort of remember her among the things she left behind. I’d sit in her rocking chair whenever I could. I’d make paper airplanes like we used to do together. It wasn’t the same. I couldn’t imagine her alive again in my mind. Not seeing her there just reminded me how gone she was which just made me even sadder.  I missed the person I was before school happened, too, before the very first day when I realized I not only looked different from all the other kids but I WAS different. I couldn’t seem to keep anything in my head the way the teachers tried to teach it either. I missed the person I was before they had sent me home with report cards that told my parents that they should make me “try harder.” I was trying as hard as I could. Even worse was the note that said I didn’t have any “aptitude for music” when up until that moment that had been the only thing I did best. I missed the way the world was before our President got shot, too.

Not counting rockets with people on them getting out into space, Tomorrowland wasn’t how it should have been at all either. It wasn’t anything like how Walt Disney described it. But that still left all his other imaginery worlds that I’d literally been born to explore -the ones that had been made specially for every child growing up in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.  Director Ang Lee once said: “I see a movie as a way of learning about the world, about myself, and learning about my relationship with people and art.” My first movies were “Peter Pan” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” The TV characters in “Zorro,” “Long John Silver” and “Mickey Mouse Club” were like part of my family. The Disney musical language that spoke of and for them was the first language of my own heart. 

But then I had to miss all of them too, when the movies came and went and the TV shows got canceled. How I’d looked forward to seeing them all again in the new Disney movie “Babes in Toyland.” It had nearly everyone I’d come to know and love in it. But then THEY weren’t as they should have been either. My beloved ‘Scarecrow’ from “Wizard of Oz” was greedy and cruel. “Bernardo” and his “Sergeant” from Zorro were gleeful murderers who “won’t be happy until they get” whatever they wanted. Annette Funicello had the same trouble with arithmetic that I did but didn’t seem to care. She was about to lose her home because of it, but only sang emptily about numbers not making sense as if it didn’t really matter!  It mattered a lot to me!

Taking walks in the woods wasn’t the same without my Grampy there to be with either, it just reminded me that he was gone, too. In ‘Toyland’ you couldn’t even take a walk in the woods without being musically menaced by the trees!! Even worse, sweet grandfatherly Ed Wynn, someone not even “Twilight Zone” could make menacing, had become mean and selfish -all at poor, smart-but-dumb Tommy Kirk’s expense. All the good guys were like me in some weird, dissatisfying way. All the bad guys, the imaginary people I’d grown up relying on to love had turned treacherous, selfish and cruel. 

If there was one word to sum up the lesson “Babes in Toyland” taught me it was ‘sarcasm.’ Learning its meaning may have helped me understand the difference between real life and stagecraft, but it left me with what seemed like my last childhood refuge in ruins. I was too young at 9 years old to feel so old or so betrayed. School wasn’t what it should have been. Life wasn’t what it was supposed to be. People, even parents and teachers, couldn’t be relied upon to be wise or even care as they should. But worse than all of that was grandparents could die… and did. 

A year later things were a little better but still not better enough. My other, very British, Grammy (who’d been an upstairs maid in England but had “ALWAYS wanted to be a nanny”) had come to live with us. She couldn’t wait to take her only granddaughter to see “Mary Poppins.”

But seeing Ed Wynn’s name listed in the cast only reminded of “Toyland” and I literally sank into my seat. I girded myself to keep in mind that Walt Disney couldn’t be trusted to be what he should be either, which made me angry all over again, then resentful, than guilty for feeling that way. 

I wanted, needed to be reminded of something else, of something, by something, just something else —reminded that there was more to being me than just being disappointed.  Luckily for me, beyond what can be taught or even dreamt of, not simply that practically perfect ‘middle way’ one might pray for, there is the ‘delightful way’ of Poppinsian philosophy. That’s what was at the heart of the movie I’d been taken to see. It gave me hope that even if all those ‘should-be’s’ weren’t -the ones within me, within my family, even the world at large- they could still all be looked at in a different way. Even if time never would remedy all my young ills, a change in the wind of my attitude very well might. And even if it didn’t, flying a kite in that fresh breeze would make all of it that much easier to bear. There is nothing more true to life than a good fantasy. It’s sweet medicine for realities that can indeed be bitter without its balm. 

The movie gave me a special way to appreciate the Gram I still had by my side, my very own Mary Poppins, with whom I still could wander and wonder and laugh. But it also gifted me with a way to remember the Grammy that I’d lost. As luck would have it, Jane Darwell could have been that grandmother’s twin. Her ‘Bird Woman’ gave me a place to find my lost Gram whenever I needed her. Her song somehow made proud, even sweet, how she was missed. There was something even grand about it. The very music of what ‘should be’ whether it is or isn’t, especially when in a minor key. Its grandness opened my blind mind’s eye and heart again to how much she and music itself were still a part of me. I would never misplace that love again no matter the circumstance or what anybody else thought or said about it. It’s the place where I’ve always been able to find my thoughts and memories ever since, like my Gram herself, sitting at the steps of Heaven calling me to never stop “feeding the birds.”

So it was with some misgivings that I “Returned” to your version of “Mary Poppins.” I did not want to be disappointed, and gratefully, I wasn’t in any way. You’ve simply shepherded a whole new vocabulary safely into the same canon, one that I’m sure will guide still more children (no matter how old they are) safely back to their hearts’ imaginations just as the original once did for me.  Thank you David Magee, Rob Marshall, John DeLuca, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Cast & Crew All for illuminarying the way!

"Winterscape" Musical Greeting

I love to explore where a new musical sound will take me. Sometimes it is as if its instrument plays me instead of me playing it. Or in this case, it suggests a landscape familiar enough to be known without being seen. When I wished I could make my own music boxes and piano rolls it never occurred to me that one day my wish would come true in such a virtual fashion. Here’s my latest homemade sponcom (spontaneous composition) Christmas card for all ye friends & family. Safe travels and Happiest Holidays one and all! Artiphon Instrument One https://artiphon.com Cubasis 2 https://www.steinberg.net Digital D1 https://audiokitpro.com/digitald1/ Sounds from Noise by ROLI https://roli.com/products/software/noise & iSymphonic https://crudebyte.com/isymphonic-orch... Video editing by LumaFusion https://luma-touch.com/lumafusion-for... Snow by VidLab http://museworks.co/vidlab/ With thanks for footage from: https://youtu.be/9Rm4sZasa8E & https://youtu.be/BXFC8hiaRcI Music/Still Photography copyright ©CinemaoftheMind (fair use allowed with attribution)

Wander(ing) on the “Go” & Visiting the Past

There are places you never expect you’ll ever visit, mountain peaks and ocean depths and all the far corners in between. Places I certainly never expected to travel on a whim. But thanks to an Oculus Go headset and an app called “Wander” now all I need is a comfy chair and WiFi to be at home anywhere in the entire world –effortlessly touring the collective work that is Google Map’s gift to all, one moment amidst penguins in Antarctica, the next the ruins of Pompeii. 

While satisfing their curiosities with famous places, it seems most people seek out their own addresses to see their homes as others see them. But I thought of another address, too, one as familiar as the family photo album. 39 Ramsden Street, Barrow-in-Furness, England. The place from where our family tree grew, branched and eventually straddled an ocean. It couldn’t still be there could it, not after 80 years? It was as easy as speaking the address out loud to look it up. To virtually be in the street where my grandmother had played as a child. 

There it was, the little stone rowhouse from whose rooftop my family watched Hailey’s comet streak across the sky in 1910 (my Gram fell asleep).  I knew without even going back to find our last photo of it from 1937 that this was it, different but the same. It was as if one could turn a corner and be transported in time. 

I couldn’t see into the back garden but I knew what it would be like, a little dooryard with a stone fence.  

I couldn’t resist exploring further, turning corners and following streets at random. Here was the town’s hall still just as proud a landmark. Yes, just like our last photo of it.

And there was the church where my Great Uncle John had been one of the “Saint George’s Boys.” 

Second kid down on the left at the end. (He grew up to be the engineer who designed the steering-wheel-linked headlight that still can be seen in use on the cop cars that careen through the noir of old gangster movies.)

Across the square from the church was the “Railwaymen’s Club” at the station where my Great Grandfather Aaron proudly received an award for his service on the line. 

This sailor from a tall ship came across a lady in distress whose carriage had broken an axle on a country road. 

He never went to sea again and they lived on Ramsden Street the rest of their lives together. The kind gentleman made a family with her and became the kindest, most loving, of fathers. It was the photographer by the way who gave him the two left feet pictured below.

Before the youngest children had grown, the eldest daughters became maids, then housekeepers at Edwardian houses not unlike those of “Downton Abby” fame. They helped to support the household, coming home only rarely for holidays. How my Grandmother Sevena (so named because she was the seventh daughter of a seventh son, seated above on her father's lap) missed her big sisters. 

Those sisters would never all reunite again under the same roof, not until all of them had made their own homes and families in the new world. My world across the sea.

Going "Beyond"

Even with the 3D glasses sliding down my nose I had forgotten I'd been following their gaze to watch “Star Trek Beyond.” When the lights came on in the theatre and the glasses came off I immediately knew something had changed. Even in the dim everything looked different somehow.

Back in the ‘50’s I'd followed my family's gaze into the comfortably small, black&white world of our first television set. It had taught me where to look and how to focus in ways not even my grandmother's constant habit of show and tell could match. A camera, after all, is just another kind of guiding hand revealing where/what to look at and how to think/feel about what one is shown. And this two-month-too-early premie needed all the help she could get just to figure out which eye could be trusted to look through.

I was lucky to have the first art teacher of the airwaves, Jon Gnagy, to draw me out of that visual confusion. The simple geometry of his penciled horizon lines and vanishing points was my first introduction to the concepts of ‘near’ versus ‘far.’ His drawings explained "the shadow and substance" of my form and distance. What always remained out of reach, however, was the third dimension that it outlined and helped guide me through.


3D was like something out of the “Twilight Zone,” something mystical, mysterious. A place where somehow everyone else lived but I was not even allowed to visit. The lack of it stubbed my toes, misguided my grasp, and washed me out of NASA’s first Young Astronauts’ program. It became something to want –and blame– as it came to signify for me why I was doing so badly in school and felt so different from my classmates. I hadn’t even realized that I also looked different from everyone else, all wall-eyed and wobbly-brained, until the first day of first grade. Decades later it could still bring me to tears to sit unmoved as I watched others bob and weave to avoid the invisible ‘things’ that reached out to them from a movie screen.

But after reading of a man who suddenly gained stereovision for the first time in his life from watching a 3D movie ( http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world ).  I HAD to try it myself, don those cursed red and blue glasses again one more time. The modern polarizing version of those old cardboard specs did show me …something. But watching “Avatar” in ‘RealD3D’  I couldn’t quite process what that 'something' was. I suspected I was merely picking up cinematic cues for what had been arbitrarily decided to be the foreground, middle, or distance of each scene. And that 'something' hadn’t lasted once the undeniably beautiful film was over. Later incarnations of ‘IMAX 3D’ and 3D television hadn’t been much better. So again I despaired, assuming binocular vision was simply the prerequisite I would need but could never have.

But a month or so before “Star Trek Beyond’s” premiere I happened upon a casual mention in an article about virtual reality that simply read: “of course one doesn’t need binocular vision to see depth.” Wait, WHAT!? A quick Google search revealed that indeed it was true. There were studies to prove it:  http://pexlab.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2014/07/24/what-does-it-mean-to-see-in-3d/


Perhaps I could still somehow get a glimpse after all?

The effect of “Beyond” seemed more subtle from the start than “Avatar.” This time, instead of being distracted by the tech –constantly challenging myself about whether I was really seeing what I thought I was– I just settled in to enjoy the continuation of a saga I’d known and loved since I was eleven years old. By the roll of the credits, careening around planets and through clouds of star stuff, I was fully “engaged” and utterly delighted. Without hardly realizing it I had indeed been truly “transported.” But how would I know if this something was real if I’d never seen it before?

Firsts don’t happen every day of one’s life. You certainly can’t have them twice. I didn’t want this one to end. But how to prepare if, like others, I would forever see my real world differently?  I’d tried to imagine what that might be like. Tried to ‘see it’ via the music of a tone poem I entitled “Stereopsis.” Like hiking an audial trail into flowering valleys and up through forests of sound to mountain vistas it mused about what I had learned from the works of Oliver Sacks, "Stereo Sue" Barry, Temple Grandin, and Barbara Arrowsmith-Young.

From their descriptions, especially of Sack's own loss of his beloved stereovision and Berry's miraculous gain of it later in life, I had felt like I had at least brailed a landscape that I could still only hope to see. …Or would this all just dissolve away the moment I leave the theatre? Was I just fooling myself? Isn’t it all an illusion anyway?

I struggled the empty popcorn bucket into the trash then squinted out into the glare of the hallway. The entry I was standing in extended out before me across and into the theatre opposite like sections of an old-fashioned telescope that had been unnested and pulled out at length. I stepped out into the corridor between and was astonished by its volume and the boundaries that created it. I strode toward the exit to join my friend Kathleen who’d made a beeline for the bathroom. My arms and legs felt extra long but I was afraid to look down at myself for fear this new sense of size and space would wear off in the process.

I came to a stop before a huge pop-up display for “Ben Hur.” I’d passed by it on the way in hardly registering that the horses and chariot were separate and extended out from the advertisement behind it.  Now I was weaving and bobbing crazily in front of the display trying to explain to Kathleen how it looked so strange to me. I didn’t just KNOW that the huge, flat white horses were not part of the flat background graphic behind them. I was perceiving it, EXPERIENCING it!

Even the little elevator that came next seemed miraculously full of space around us. It was as if I was suddenly aware of the air itself as a shape. In the lobby below it occurred to me I could test this new sense. Grasping things at arm’s length directly in front of me had always been a hit and mostly miss proposition. Now I didn’t need to correct my reach at all.  On our way by I could touch the top of each stanchion that marked the queue to the refreshment counter. Dare I believe this?

The sun-dappled interior of the mall was like stepping out into a cathedral. The apex of its skylight yawned three-stories high overhead. Its vast hallways extended out in all directions in a riot of lines and colors and people. The feeling was exhilarating, intoxicating.

Walking past counters in Macy’s, dodging around displays just to enjoy the spaces between, I passed before a floor to ceiling mirror and stopped dead. How many times had I absent-mindedly walked face-first into one of these in a public place, excusing myself to my own reflection? Now for the first time I could SEE it was not like the room around it. I looked past its edge at the ‘near’ of the perfume counter and the ‘far’ of an escalator beyond. Dimensions the mirror clearly did not have. Wow. Mirrors are flat!

I checked my strabismus in the reflection. As Kathleen had confirmed a moment before, if anything I was more wall-eyed than ever. By this time however, I was too giddy to care. I wove back and forth through the shoe department as if it were a ride at Disneyland. Kathleen lagged far behind, disavowing ever knowing me.

I paused between the inner and outer doors to the parking lot. If a mirror is flat, why isn't the view out the windows flat too?  Before Kathleen had caught up so I could ask, the summer heat trapped by all the surrounding glass reminded me to breathe. What I’d actually started to do was hyper-ventilate (another first). The giddy sensation was now bordering on light-headed dizziness. Bursting out into the fresh air outside didn’t help at all. All of it –all at once– made me feel like I’d again drunk from the bottle in “Alice in Wonderland.” Everything loomed huge and I felt lost among cars, and trees, and walls, and whole flotillas of clouds sailing by. Luckily, a magnificent turkey vulture, beautiful at least in flighted silhouette, was wheeling directly overhead. It gave my attention sanctuary, a point of reference for where ‘I’ was amidst all the confusion.

Up, down, sideways and into Kathleen’s car panting like a long distance runner.

The drive home wasn’t quite so pleasant either. Looking straight ahead was like those dolly-zoom sequences in Hitchcock movies when the camera is moved backwards or forwards while its zoom lens is dialed in the opposite direction. Trying to only look off to the side didn’t help either as every indentation between cars or trees or buildings drew me in over and over again in rapid succession. For the first time in my life I got car sick. I finally had to close my eyes whether I wanted to or not.

Well into the evening I was nauseous and it took two days for the headache to wear off. But it was worth it.

Now even in the familiar surroundings of my home I find my attention constantly being drawn to the floor, my gaze drawn across it, past the furniture and up the walls, to stop at the ceiling’s edge. Now these rooms are more than just containers of objects and memories, they are also the boundaries of another dimension. Space, my final frontier.

Elder Communication - Partners in Conversation

Roy Dotrice & Cherry Jones in "Moon for the Misbegotten"

Comfortably early, I settled in to my seat close to the center stage. Broadway… it had been a long time, but there I was again about to happily applaud a beloved friend's triumph, relishing the idea of hugging the stuffing out of him later on. A family bustled in behind me leaving their coats, bags, packages, and father behind to guard them. "I haven't been here in so long!" he suddenly confided to no one else there but me. I turned politely and smiled, "Me, too!"

The older man seemed almost desperate to chat, but despite his obvious intelligence and knowledge, he wasn't quite holding up his end of the conversation. In response I automatically took an accustomed lead, bridging the gaps in his reasoning with my own, keeping the dance of words as best I could in natural motion between us as possible.

I'd spent the better part of my adult life caring for various family members who were coping with just such memory problems, even dementia. Sadly, those memories seemed to have followed me even on that one day off I'd managed to wrangle in a very long time. But I couldn't resent this fella for it. The more we talked, about theater and Eugene O'Neil, and the O'Neil play that we were about to see, the happier and more animated he became. I learned quite a bit, but it was my 'prof' who thanked me, exclaiming, "It's such a relief!"

I wondered at that, him being such an obviously well-off, handsome gent, blessed after all with a family that would still see to it he could attend a Broadway play.

I stopped wondering once his daughter returned. She was not happy that he had struck up a conversation with a stranger. Rather than allow herself to be introduced she apologized for her father's intrusion. He objected, but what before had been an easy dance with a willing partner became a fencing match as she constantly stopped and corrected him: "No Daddy, that wasn't how it was. No, you've forgotten. No, don't you remember? No, It's not like that. No, what are you trying to say?"

With every verbal parry, the man seemed reminded of a mind he no longer fully possessed and the father he no longer was. He melted back into his seat, silent and defeated. Noting his distress, but still too aware of her own hurt to recognize her own part in it, the woman then sweetly finished off her dad's last shred of dignity. Out came a condescending litany of necessary questions all caregivers learn that keeps everyone and everything manageable.

I turned 'round and sat captive in my seat until my own thoughts finally overcame the numbing silence. It had been easier lending this stranger my sense of sense then it had been with all the family and family friends I'd had to assist over the years. I'd never noticed before what a huge difference that little deference, or lack of it, could make.

You CAN remember the past into the present for someone suffering from memory loss. It IS possible to tether another's stalled train of thought to your own locomotive; substituting new track for old. Where a question might be a reminder of something wrong or a challenge about what has been forgotten, a statement can redirect attention to something shared or something new:

"Wasn't that a great performance yesterday?"

Would become this:

"That play of O'Neil's that we went to see on Broadway yesterday was really great. "Moon for the Misbegotten's" still a classic. I liked the way they...."

Living in the present moment is the goal of so many mindful meditative practices. Yet if your moment-before has been misplaced and you can't even imagine the moment-coming next, 'now' can be a pretty lonely and confusing place to be. So make every question you can into a declarative sentence and always try to speak in complete stories (with plenty of memory hooks sprinkled in to grab on to). When you've experienced the difference the gift of conversation can make in terms of quality of life for caregiver and cared-for alike, you will find that it is well worth the effort!

"Once Upon a Time" and the Bombing of Boston

We are, all of us, weaned on stories. Through them we learn where we are from and who we are. As we grow, the 'reality' of those stories becomes either discarded or reinforced by experience. When I was very little I thought a giant ran the local grocery store. Rumplestiltskin himself bent in the golden light of his electric sewing machine to mend our clothes. With age, I found that the maker of miracle cures down the street was not Merlin, but Sid the pharmacist. And the little tailor with the magical sewing machine had numbers tattooed on his forearm that told a far sadder story. 

Of course, when a new series embraced this very concept decades later, I was hooked (so to speak). Television, even with the rise of the internet, is still my storyteller of choice and "Once Upon A Time" has proven itself a worthy companion and often welcome distraction. I needed just such a remedy over this past couple weeks. First for the sheer dogged drudgery of finishing up my taxes. Then as a panacea to divert thoughts from the spectacle and aftermath of the marathon bombings. 

But when the last Boston terrorist was about to be caught, we couldn't help but leave the tv news on as we hoped that he would indeed be caught or killed. Trouble was the culprit had the face of a teenager. His name may have been foreign but his life sounded, for the most part, like an American one. No matter what his crimes, I realized that his actions were the result of the stories that he had been taught by others. He suddenly became just a trapped, frightened, injured boy. A desperate soul too dangerous to be afforded mercy. Nevertheless, a boy quite likely about to pay a terrible price for his choices. I couldn't help it, I felt sorry for him. Then I was reminded of those he conspired to kill or maim, which made me feel guilty for feeling sorry for him. My Gram, who would not willingly deign to judge anyone, not even Hitler, might have replied "hate the sin, not the sinner." Something I may admire in theory but often find hard to put into practice. 

Conflicted, my thoughts retreated to Storybrooke. But there, too, I found the same conundrum. I'd already been guilty of being as in love as Belle herself with the joie de vive with which Robert Carlyle enlivens his sympathetic villain. I was quite willing, in fact, to overlook the monster in favor of the man --to blame the curse, not the cursed. Thanks to OUAT's writers, compassion had come as a consequence of understanding evil as being "made not born." Like so many others, I have wickedly delighted in Queen Lana Parrilla's every zestful, lovelorn attempt at revenge or redress. But truth be told, most fantasy victims lack such means. Like soldiers to the ogre wars or the tradesman turned into a snail and crushed underfoot --they are (so far) forgotten. 

Back to reality...

In real life, at least as told by cable news and the internet, the Boston story began as that of the fallen. Where they were in their lives. Who they were to the people who loved them. That is as it should be. Perhaps that is how in real life, as in its fantastical reflection, retribution will not leave all eventually blind and toothless. Unfortunately, not every resentment or hate-filled scenario will end in failure as a cautionary tale. But good stories, like the good works of a well-lived life, will always triumph regardless of how they're ended. ...So long as they continue to be told.

A Different Kid with a Gun

Many parents are trying to read their children's minds right now. They are wondering how their kids are dealing with the violence let alone the concept of death that the Sandy Hook School massacre represents. For parents of so-called "different" kids it is yet one more added concern. Theirs are the children who now may be mistrusted as well as being excluded from play. They are the ones most likely to be bullied as they face learning and/or social challenges few "normal" people can even conceive of. Many, many years ago, I was one of those children. I share this excerpt from a soon-to-be published memoir in hopes of shedding some light on why guns are thought of as such a beloved solution to life’s problems. And to offer this hope to the neuro-diverse:  What seems like a curse today can and will turn out to be your greatest gift tomorrow....

I was four years old going on five when we first visited a popular multi-themed park called “Storytown” near Lake George, New York. Its claim to fame was an entire ‘authentic’ western village called “Ghost Town.” Of course, I wandered off as usual, wanting to see what was beyond the general store and saloon. There was always a new discovery to be made, down an alleyway or around a corner. This time would be no exception! 

I found myself face to face with an entire gang of outlaws on horseback! 

The huge horses snorted their disapproval, but I stood my ground. 

I was all there was between them and the innocent townsfolk. I knew exactly what to do.  

“You’re the bad guys. You’re under cit, citi... I’m taking you to the sheriff! ” I exclaimed in my most authoritative voice. The big, stubble-faced, nasty-looking men blinked and looked at each other.  “We’re gonna miss our cue,” one said. “We’ve gotta get up to the crag in 2 minutes,” said another.  

I continued to stand my ground.

A spokesman was chosen by a quick vote of nods. He was a handsome fellow, all in black; “Ah, Little Lady? We can’t be here right now.”

Well, that made a whole lot of sense.  I wasn’t budging. 

An idea flashed across the man’s face. “Ah, why don’t you go tell the sheriff you saw us. He ought’a be at the saloon right now!”

And let them get away?  Never.

“Come on, we gotta go.” one whispered. 

“You, you, just wait right there. You’ll see us again real soon.” The leader gently kicked at the flanks of his horse, gingerly guiding it around me. I looked up to see girth, boots, spurs and a surprising anatomy lesson as he rode past. It was a boy horse, he was just like HT underneath. We had hid at the top of my bedroom stairs and looked to see whether we were really that different from one another under our clothes. We were.

The rest of the gang followed suit one by one. The outlaws left me, literally, in their dust, red-faced and stifling back tears of indignation. I could hear their laughter as they disappeared. I raced back onto the street and into the saloon. Breaking through a forest of adult legs and wading into a group of kids my own size and smaller. “SHERIFF!  SHERIFF!”   

I came to a stop against him, breathless.  

“Whoa there, what’s the matter?”  

“The, the bad guys.  I saw ‘em.”  

The lawman absent-mindedly looked at his pocket watch and raised an eye brow.

“They were out by the barn!” I sputtered. 

He wasn’t moving.  

I actually got to say those immortal words, “THEY WENT THAT A WAY!” 

He still wasn’t moving. 

The man glanced at the other children around him and looked at his watch again. The wide-brim of his hat came to rest on the top of my head as he whispered, “Why don’t we just wait a moment, I’m sure we’ll see ‘em come back up over the crag any time now.”  

How did he know they were coming back, or where they would be?  I pulled back from his encircling arm unable to hide my doubt and confusion. Was he in cahoots?  No. He was the good guy. That was Unthinkable. Then how did he know? What was he waiting for?!

The sheriff furrowed his brow. Then a small half-smile slid up one side of his face as he addressed the crowd: “I do believe this lil’ missy has seen our desperadoes on the move...” 

But HE still wasn’t moving!

“For being So observant.” He fished a small star from his vest, “I hereby deputize her my deputy.  Here ya go.” He handed me the badge. 

Oh, a present!  I beamed.

“Come ‘on, deputy. You stick with me.” Everyone piled outside after us. Just as we emerged, the outlaws appeared majestically on the rise overlooking the main street. How did the sheriff know? They drew their guns and charged down the hill, firing as they went. 

“Everybody take cover!! It’s Black Bart and his gang!” the sheriff yelled, depositing me safely against the wall behind him.  Suddenly there was a dizzying flurry of gunfire coming from everywhere. A man fell from his horse, then another and another.  One came out a window trailing a lace curtain as he went. He rolled down and off a porch roof to the ground.  Still another careened from a rooftop. 

Soon, all the outlaws had bit the dust in whole mouthfuls. The street, now littered with lifeless bodies, swirled with sulfur smoke and rising dust devils.  The horses, who seemed peculiarly unconcerned, were led away out of sight. 

The outlaw leader lay at the feet of the sheriff. The triumphant lawman absent-mindedly blew across the barrel of his six-shooter and holstered the weapon with an expert twirl. He ambled out into the street to address the crowd: “Well, that about does it folks. Hope you enjoyed the show!”

I wasn’t paying any attention any longer. I squatted down on my haunches, resting my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands. The outlaw I had just been talking to lay very still, face down, in the dirt before me.  At first, I was only curious at how his silver-studded black hat had managed to stay on, but then the concept of ‘dead’ being good or bad became the consideration.  It’s bad to get killed, but if you’re bad, than it’s good. 

Can that be right? 

If only they’d have let me arrest them like I wanted, they’d all be safely in jail now. If I had a gun like the sheriff’s, they’d have paid attention to me. Yes, I’ve gotta have a gun like the sheriff’s just in case this happens again.

The hat moved!  

An eye opened underneath it, saw me and instantly shut again.  A big exhale of dust issued out to the side as the man’s face hit the ground again --making a loud, exasperated, whiney sound. This got the sheriff’s attention.“UhhOHH, HEY, Deputy?” 

As I rose, I saw motion down the street and turned to look. All the dead were getting up, dusting themselves off, or walking away!  My eyes widened to saucers and I felt my mouth drop open. The sheriff tried to turn my attention away. “Deputy? Deputy. Ummm, Deputy?” He was obviously trying not to laugh. At that, Black Bart got up on all fours grinning from ear to ear. Half his face, including teeth and around one eye, sparkled with grit. “Oh, don’t!” exclaimed the sheriff, laughing helplessly. Bart ignored him. He touched his hat brim in grand fashion, nodded at me, sprang up to his feet and quickly walked away as if nothing had happened. 

I looked up at the sheriff in total, abject bewilderment and watched him fight off a cascade of high-pitched giggles until tears began to form. “I...”  “You...” “Awww...” “You see, this...” “Ah...” 
The crowd had re-gathered to watch the new entertainment.  “Oh, shei...” he said under his breath. The sheriff flagged down a passing wagon.  “Deputy, ahem, Deputy, I need you to ride shotgun for me on this here fire wagon. Where are your parents? Oh, yes, there you are folks.”  In a single motion he swung me up high into the seat next to the driver.  “Tom, giv’er your helmet?” There was a pleading sound in his voice. The driver took it off his own head and began balancing it precariously on mine.  

“You can even wear the honorary hat!” This successfully changed the subject, but the Sheriff wasn’t going to take any chances.  “Hey, Daddy, why not take a picture! ...BYE NOW!” Before I could figure out why, since I was an only child, someone else but me would call my father ‘daddy,’ the lawman had skeedadled, pronto.

My parents could not make it past the gift shop that day without buying me a shiny, silver-plated, pearl-handled, six-shooter-style cap gun. The management had thoughtfully made it impossible to leave the theme park without making one’s way past all their souvenirs. I thought my gun a most beautiful object and a fascinating mechanism. I loved making little explosions at will and even liked the way the caps smelled after it had fired.  The next time we went to Ghost Town I was prepared ...badge and gun at the ready. And when friends Joey and Michael came to visit, my gun did fine service in every imaginable shoot-’em-up game. I prided myself on being shot dead convincingly. And, like Black Bart, getting back up again with a smile.

A year after this triumphant turn as a gunslinging cowgirl, I was seated in a second grade classroom at School #4 when an announcement by the principal stunned everyone into silence. We were told to go home, but somehow no one, not even the teacher, knew what to do. I got up, wandered over and looked out the window. The world didn't look any different. Accept across the street and on the same floor as mine, at a Roman Catholic school called Vincentian, I saw for the first time an identical classroom. It was filled with second graders, too. 

Why had I never noticed that before?  

There was another girl my own age standing there in her Catholic-school plaid uniform. She, too, stood alone at one of her classroom’s windows and looked back out at me. How strange. We didn’t smile, or wave. We just noticed that we were the only two looking out at one another at that moment --the day our president was shot.

The sound of real gunfire replayed over and over on the television news after I got home. Our president was dead for real. He would never get back up again, or smile. Then we saw his murderer shot and killed right there before the nation’s unblinking camera eye, just as it was happening.  Both the good guy and the bad guy were dead for real. Nothing, nothing had ever felt so wrong. On the day of John F. Kennedy’s funeral, I buried my pretty gun in the backyard and never played dead again.