Travels with Charlie

Travels with Charlie is a title I would much like to use for the book I’m writing (very slowly) about Charlie, autism, and education. As Jim has pointed out to me, that title—-with “Charlie” spelled the other way, “Charley”—has already been taken, by the great California writer John Steinbeck for his Travels with Charley: In Search of America, Charley being his French poodle. Travel is the theme for this month’s b5media Science and Health Channel Theme Day and travel is one my favorite metaphors to describe our life with Charlie in what I have sometimes called “Autismland,” a word meant to capture the sense of how raising an autistic child is an experience perhaps quite different from what one might have imagined.

Different, and different (for me, for Jim), in a wholly “posautive” way. Charlie’s has truly been an unexpected childhood—-and, I guess I might say, my parenting him an “unexpected motherhood.” And it is thanks to him that I have been able to journey in places (metaphorical and literal) that I would never have ventured to, and met so many people whose paths would not otherwise have crossed mine.

Jim and I have literally traveled often with Charlie in the backseat, first of the little green Saturn, then the “green car” (=a pleasantly rusting stationwagon), then the “black car” (another stationwagon, with less rust so far). For years I rode in the right side of backseat with him—at first, the better to interact; later, out of necessity should Charlie get anxious or upset and go for the window. About two years ago I permanently moved back to the passenger seat. I’ve more room now, but what roads did I travel side by side with my boy: Jim drove us up and down the Mississippi river when we lived in St. Louis and then in St. Paul and then in St. Louis again, and back and forth between the Midwest and New Jersey, when we went to the Jersey shore in the summer. Transplants in the Midwest, we traveled across Missouri to Kansas City, up to north up to Kirksville and south to Cape Girardeau, St. Genevieve, and Memphis. We went north from the Twin Cities to Duluth and Two Harbors and Charlie, who was just learning to walk back in the late summer of 1998 waded in Lake Superior. And then, in May of 2001, we drove back east through St. Louis’ Gateway Arch and Ilinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, back to Jersey, so that Charlie could go to school here.

Not that our travels are over; we have moved a few times within New Jersey (for the sake of the right school program for Charlie) and have one more move ahead of us. Every day with Charlie brings a new adventure, even if all we do is go to the grocery store or trying out something completely new like Tuesday’s surf camp (a new experience that left Charlie triumphantly grinning and running on the beach yesterday, and out cold on the couch all morning, but who wouldn’t be after swimming in the ocean with an 8-foot surfboard attached to your right ankle?). One more metaphor: I think all the time that our life with Charlie is like an epic poem, an odyssey on a par with the Odysseus of Greek mythology, as Homer wrote about him in the Odyssey; as I wrote two summers ago:

Autism is an epic poem full of adventures to places you’ve never been, hair-breadth escapes from the sorceress Calpyso’s island and man-eating monsters like the Cyclops and from tight situations (Scylla and Charybdis), meetings with amazing people you could never have imagined (for Odysseus, the gracious Phaeaecians and beautiful Nausicaä.

Well, if I can’t use Travels with Charlie as my book’s title, it can be the name of one chapter.

Onward—-and glad especially to be accompanied by so many fellow travelers, so many friends, on the road.