Chapter Three
An older woman with long white hair dug one confident hand gently into a box of blue licorice. She removed a handful and carefully fingered the pieces together in a rubbery stalk of blueberry-flavor. As in a PBS documentary from the early 90’s, a narration began to overdub the older woman, who, spry and hard-working, began speaking to a much shorter, older woman standing beside her with the grocery cart.
“Autism…” began the narrator.
A grocery store in small-town Ohio. The woman gathering licorice for the older woman with autism, continued to collect a cart filled with various blue items. Turquoise blue knit gloves, dark blue jeans, navy bath towels… Maybe cotton balls and eyeglasses, but they weren’t blue…
When I opened my eyes to the morning alarm of The Bear pulling back the shades, my reality was more of squirrels nests in frozen trees and sounds of the coffee grinder in the kitchen than shopping for blue in rural Ohio.
I heard the water running in the bathroom, Puck cheer-leading himself as he washed his hands…
“Beast! Beast! Beast, beast, beast! Beast! Beast! Beast, beast, beast!”
“Looks like his surgery is going to be on the 22nd of this month.”
I had phoned Mom, who was organizing shelves at the church library. That was fast, I thought. We’ve known about Francis’ common case of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome for years. And now he was locked in for the same procedure that a handful of family and friends had already experienced in recent times. Considering his position on the swim team, it was better to get it over with.
Puck was singing songs in Irish. Well. Song. Probably all the wrong words, too, and had no clue what they meant. But he was trying. The kid can’t find a tune on pitch in a bucket, but I still somehow figured out what he was singing. The chorus for “Siúil a Rún”, which is no easy mix of syllables. He then tore through bowls of all-beef hot dogs, colby jack, orange pepper, and carrots for lunch. Milk on the side. I realized laely that he’s been needing stockier food the last few weeks, and it’s been helping. Twelve plus solid hours of sleep again last night proved it. I welcome all growth spurts. I think it must promote creative thought as well. If there is ever a single moment in the week – except maybe when he’s hopping trains on The Bear’s iPad every Saturday – where his brain isn’t a volcano of ideas and inventions, I’ll eat my hat…
“Mom?” he asked, halfway through his bowl. “When will I be as tall as 100?”
That’s a question I can work with.
“You’re already over 100 centimeters.”
“I am?!”
A quick chat with Carrie-Bri about the calendar after her next flight lesson – license pending low blood pressure inquiry – cut the 100 idea. I looked over and Puck was licking the archaeology brush so he could “clean the window”, his cheeks stained orange again from the jumbo carrot. See what I mean…
I had my own ideas, too. With the tiny canvases that Lucia had given me for Christmas, I tried my hand at some goopy oils once again. I could see it in my head – a gold field splashed with a few sapphire blooms. Sort of abstract. You might not know what it was. On a chunky canvas. The result was moderately satisfying. I finished the first two colors in a few minutes with Puck acting as artistic advisor, which went more along the lines of…
“Mom! Mom! Can I help? Could I have this other canvas? Could I have a brush? Could I paint that? Here! Use this brush! Try this one!”
I set my first phase under a large black melamine bowl on The Bear’s desk, hoping he wouldn’t forget what was underneath and send the thing flying. I warned him about it when he walked in the door.
“It’s a field!” Puck announced. “And there’s a snake in it!”
“I would never put a snake in my paintings,” I protested, as if I could even have a “thing” in the realm of painting.
“Mom!” Puck giggled to himself half an hour later, as he stood on Cracker’s scratching box. “I did something, something funny I saw in Calvin. I put the end of the toilet paper in the toilet and I flushed it and it kept going down the toilet.” – He giggled again, shiny chubby cheeks. – “Tell Dad what I did.”
The Bear just laughed, “Can I see?”
They prompted the experiment again; I guess it worked pretty well, actually.
“I can’t believe Kirk went to Disney World!” Puck rolled his head in disbelief over his bowl of pork steak.
“You don’t even know what Disney World is…”
“I can’t believe he went to Disney World! Kirk is such an amazing kid!”
Something wasn’t right in the heel of my right foot. A small lump revealed a tiny piece of glass that had obviously been there for some time. A tweezer and ten minutes later removed the tiny shard. Hydrogen peroxide. Sometimes you have to manage your own surgeries.