All In It Together

After a big day at the beach yesterday, it’s been a very quiet Labor Day around here, Charlie humming and hanging (and getting in some cello practice after a few weeks’ hiatus). My dad took some videos of Charlie swimming and we all watched those, and Charlie and Jim went on a bike ride past four train stations. (And I’ve been more than glad that it’s Labor Day as, felled by a stomach thing, I would not have been able to do too much laboring today).

The announcement about Governor Sarah Palin’s daughter and reports about Hurricane Gustav kept us all talking and following the news; an organization called Autism Cares is looking for families with autistic children who’ve been affected by Gustav and are in need of support. A friend who’s an actor and from New Orleans is  writing a play, Excavating Katrina, about the trauma his family and friends have been through. Back in July, my friend organized a reading of his play and I read the narrator’s line, and it brought back memories of following Katrina and the storm’s devastation.

In particular, I recalled the account of one autism family who I “met” via the dad’s blog, Injecting Sense. Injecting Sense takes a different position about matters of cure and a number of topics that get talked about (and debated, and argued over) than I tend to here. Nonetheless, I’d like to think—I really think—-we’re all really on the same path, dealing with the same worries (especially with a new school year starting in a few days). Certainly three years ago, when Hurricane Katrina hit and in its aftermath, there was much shared feeling about what really matters and the need to rebuild, as I wrote almost three years ago.

Autism brings us all into some strange waters, though I suspect that is not the best metaphor right now. It is perhaps too easy to talk about “life with autism” as a disaster waiting to happen, and then a real one does. We’re all thinking of you here–I’m sitting in my office, directly across the river from where the World Trade Center was. Katrina has been making a lot of people here in NJ/NY think back to 9/11, not to mention it is early September. We had just moved back (from St. Louis) to Jersey when 9/11 happened. Even though Charlie was struggling (and had such a really tough October–picking up on the general sorrow–that he had to be moved back into a more highly structured classroom), everything that happened and the aftermath reminded us of how grateful we were to have each other and to be together.

Certainly I’m more than grateful to have been able to have shared some words and memories with Injecting Sense and with so many of you, with all of our spectrum of beliefs and opinions. It often doesn’t feel like it when the rhetoric and the vitriol start flying but the good thing to me is, we keep flinging words at each other, and keep talking.