Post by wrblack on Dec 18, 2008 13:44:54 GMT -5
Cross posting again. Think I've poached both of those pieces here before, but it's been a while.
Local group had annual holiday party on Sunday. I'm about to go to a free lunch, I think. Kids are having holiday parties at school. I think that Wodehouse character may have phrased it about right, Christmas at our throats, again.
And what have we to look forward to? Well, we take Charlie in for just a pressure check to see how his glaucoma is behaving on the 23rd, the day before the day before Christmas. Wish us luck.
Then I guess we'll go on for another blood draw to recheck vitamin D level. Just too much fun for the holidays. But might as well get it over with.
I think two of my favorite Christmas pieces are the bits by George Will and Martha Beck I've tacked on below, both lifted from the Riverbend site,
www.altonweb.com/cs/downsyndrome/index.htm
But, in looking around for them, I found something I posted exactly 5 years ago today,
-----------
Yesterday Santa visited Charlie's special ed pre-school class. Charlie came home with a toy dump truck in his backpack, and in the bed of the dump truck were two artificial rocks. Truck and rocks are made of plastic; rocks are the color of light brown mustard, not the yellow stuff nor the really spicy stuff but the in-between flavor. When his mom took the truck out of his backpack, Charlie couldn't contain his excitement, was wiggling and giggling all over. He has this wicked little laugh, sounds like he thinks he just got away with something. We hear it every time he takes the first bite of an ice cream sandwich.
Charlie loves his new little truck and its rocks. Last evening looked like he was having one of his bears drive the truck. But he had entertained himself for much of the afternoon putting rocks in and taking rocks out and tasting them, rather bland I would think.
Charlie Brown was disappointed to find a rock in his Christmas stocking, but I think Charlie Black would be thrilled to get a rock in his. Reminds me of the story about Adam Beck choosing a gift from a favorite aunt as the present he was allowed to open one Christmas Eve and that present turning out to be the batteries she had wrapped separately from the toys and gadgets that needed batteries. Think Martha Beck and the aunt were inclined to let Adam pick another present, but he was having none of it, was too busy running around the house finding, with great delight, all the things the batteries could be used in.
What are you supposed to do with these kids? If we gave Charlie a lump of coal he'd probably love it, and make a mess. We'd have a little Black boy in blackface, and none too skillfully applied I'd guess.
We seem to be running a bit late with Christmas preparations in our house. I'd like to just cancel it this year, but Charlie's mom and siblings won't let me. And Charlie's mom has been nagging me about what we should get for this nephew, niece, teacher, therapist. Rocks! Can't imagine why I hadn't thought of it sooner. Give them all rocks. Maybe an assortment of natural and artificial, with various presentations. Charlie loves 'em. And if they're good enough for Charlie, then they're d**n well good enough for any and everybody else. ....
Charlie's mom and quite a few other people probably think I'm the one who deserves a lump of coal. Hmm, maybe I could shellac it with polyurethane and then let Charlie have it. A lump of coal would be fine by me and more than I expect. All this giving and decorating and celebrating are getting in the way of me enjoying Christmas. And I think I enjoy Christmas more than any other agnostic I know. And wouldn't want to let a silly thing like religion get in the way of something as important as Christmas.
I'd be happy to get a lump of coal and get Christmas giving over with. But what I really want this year is for the entire family, each and everyone of us, to get through this winter and spring without any flu or RSV. If I could have that with my lump of coal, I'd count myself way ahead in the giving and getting.
Happy and healthy holidays to all,
Bob
-------------
This year Jonathan Will, age 15, is getting the greatest gift that can be given: a friend. The fact that this friend, a large dog, does not need to be wrapped is but one of its merits. Her merits. Angel is a blond Labrador. About her, as about all members of that dignified species, there clings, like banker's worsted, the aura of knowing what is best but being too well-bred to insist on it. So she will improve the tone of the household, as she has done of Christmas.
"We shall soon be having Christmas at our throats," says a P. G. Wodehouse character who should be ashamed of himself. The routs and revels that erupt in connection with Christmas do take their toll on body and soul. Once you have had your fill of eggnog, which is easy to do, and once you have dusted from your shirt front the sugar from the pfeffernusse cookies, and once you have chewed through those gummy bits that make eating fruitcake such hard exercise, when you have done those things.
Furthermore, Christmas Eve invariably is a Walpurgisnacht of trips to drugstores for batteries that were not included in the box containing (you will discover on Christmas Day) 42,389 of the 42,390 parts in the do-it-yourself mainframe computer. On the box are printed those three terrible words: "Some Assembly Required."
Dogs come assembled and need no batteries. Blessed Angel is 6 and has graduated from finishing school and is ready to do what dogs do. A cynic once said that to his dog, every man is Napoleon, hence the popularity of dogs. Actually, no sensible person wants to feel like a Corsican brigand, so for "Napoleon" substitute, say, "Alan Greenspan." Dogs make us feel lofty but not so forbiddingly grand as to be unapproachable.
A philosophic dog like a Labrador will, if given half a chance, give to us the closest we are apt to come to unconditional love. Pedants may take issue with the ascription of love to an animal. But however we categorize what dogs do for us, it is what it is, and it comes down to this: our dogs are always glad to see us. They want to step high, wide and plentiful with us, and then doze in the sun in close proximity to us.
These days Jonathan is a boy of the great indoors, having discovered Bon Jovi (a rock group) and the teen-age pleasure of sovereignty in one's own room. Angel — who, by the way, is approximately the color of rich Devon cream — presumably will put up with a lot of Bon Jovi. But she also will insist on brisk walks, which will do both of them a world of good.
Jonathan is handicapped (Down's syndrome) and sometimes has trouble making his abundant thoughts and feelings understood by strangers. So at times, with poignant urgency, he has turned for companionship to a neighbor's dog, another blond Lab, named Skylab.
There is a large lesson here about the handicapped. Jon is just like everyone else, only a bit more so, in the following sense.
A shadow of loneliness is inseparable from the fact of individual existence. This shadow is perhaps somewhat darker for people like Jon because their ability to articulate — the ability by which we all cope with the apartness that defines our condition — is, even more than for most of us, not commensurate to their abilities to think and feel.
So Jon has found, as all dog lovers do, consolation in the company of a four-legged friend. If Skylab could speak — and, come to think about it, he does, with eloquent body language from tongue to tail — he would testify to the fact that Jon's handicap is no impediment to the flow of friendship.
In fact, watching the reciprocated pleasure between Jon and Skylab, I have come to a conclusion suited to this season. It is that some small mitigation of the harshness of life's lottery, some gently compensating thumb on the scale of justice, has given Jon an enlarged talent for friendship, with people and with their best friends.
So this year Jon gets Angel. Or Angel gets Jon, which is much the same thing. The unencumbered mutuality, the free flowing of giving between a dog and a boy, is a lesson in life's goodness, and the lesson is part of the greatest gift. -- George F. Will, The Washington Post, December 24, 1987, Page A15
-------------
My son Adam was diagnosed with Down syndrome two months before he was born, one gray winter day when I was a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Only hours after hearing the news, I waddled my pregnant self over to the library, hoping that researching my baby's condition could somehow calm the storm that raged inside me. As I walked across the campus, where I'd been a student since I was seventeen, the thought that my son would never go to college — not any college — numbed me, body and soul, until I hardly felt the cold.
Just outside of Harvard Yard, I stopped to drop some change into the outstretched hat of a ragged homeless man. He looked at my abdomen, flashed me a huge smile, and said, "Congratulations, Mamma!" I glanced around, not realizing for a moment that he was talking to me. I had already stopped believing that my pregnancy merited congratulations. At that moment, I thought of Adam as though he were a Christmas present that had broken before it was even unwrapped. If that man only knew, I thought bitterly.
Now, more than ten years later, I love the memory of the homeless man and his cheerful greeting. It's like looking back on a time of sickness to remind myself of the joy of getting well. Remembering my dread and fear helps me appreciate, all over again, the incredible gift I was given when Adam came along.
I felt this especially keenly the Christmas when Adam was five. As usual, all three of my children arose at an ungodly hour and descended on their gifts like locusts on an alfalfa field. Along with most other American parents, my husband John and I had spent a good part of the previous month tracking down the items our children had requested in their letters to Santa. Katie, the oldest, had asked for a set of bird calls she'd seen in an FAO Schwartz catalogue. Five-year-old Lizzie wanted one of those dolls they advertise on Saturday morning cartoons, the ones with repulsively cute names, that have been engineered to mimic the least pleasant behaviors of real human babies. I think that year Lizzie's doll had an anxiety-related bedwetting disorder or something. Adam wanted a whole brigade of toys with names like Cretin Slime Monsters.
In the proud tradition of delayed gratification my husband John had inherited from his Nordic ancestors, the children opened their presents one by one. Katie went first. The FAO Schwartz bird call set had turned out to cost several hundred dollars, so John and I had purchased what we thought was a reasonable facsimile. It didn't cover quite as broad an ornithological spectrum as the pricier set, but it could produce a great duck sound, a good owl, and several very convincing songbirds. When she saw it, Katie's face fell. It is an awful thing to see your kid's face fall on Christmas morning.
"Don't you like it?" I asked anxiously.
"No, no, it's okay. I like it." Katie smiled a stalwart smile, but her lower lip trembled ever so slightly. I began to feel that we should perhaps have taken out a second mortgage to pay for the FAO Schwartz bird-call set.
Lizzie went next. She tore the gift wrapping off her bedwetting doll, and then she, too, developed that troubled look around the eyes.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"Well," said Lizzie, "it's not exactly what I asked for."
John, who had fought his way through about seventeen toy stores looking for that particular doll, burst out, "I thought you wanted a Tiny Whiny Princess Wee-Wee!"
"I did," said Lizzie in her precocious little voice, "but I wanted the one with the pink jewels, and this one only has the purple jewels."
Within minutes, both the girls had reconciled themselves to their gifts. Like their pioneer forebears, many of whom had died crossing the Great Plains on foot in the dead of winter, dragging their possessions behind them in handcarts, my daughters were able to steel themselves to the brutal realities of an imperfect world. This was good, because I had been on the verge of sending them both to military school.
Now it was Adam's turn. He fished around under the Christmas tree until he found a package with his name on it. He tore the paper off, holding his breath, and found—batteries. An eight-pack of double D's, still encased in plastic.
"Oh, honey," I said, "that's not the real present. The real present is—"
But Adam didn't hear me. He was staring at those batteries as if they were so magnificent he couldn't quite take them in. His mouth fell open in astonished ecstasy as he held the batteries up to the light.
"Oh, wow!" he said. "Oh, wow! Mom, look! Batteries!" (Actually, it sounded more like, "Mom, ook! Aggabies!" but the meaning was clear.
Before we could divert his attention to any other gift, Adam leapt to his feet and began running around the house, locating every appliance, tool, and toy that ran on batteries. The whole time, he babbled excitedly about all the things he could do with this fabulous, fabulous gift. As we watched, it began to occur to all of us "normal" people in the family that batteries really were a pretty darn good Christmas present. They didn't look like much, on the face of it, but think what they could do! Put them in place, and inanimate objects suddenly came to life, moving, talking, singing, lighting up the room. Something about Adam always manages to see straight past the outward ordinariness of a thing to any magic it may hold inside.
So this has become part of my holiday ritual: every winter I go back to that terrible December day when I learned that I was about to become the mother of a retarded child. I hear the homeless man saying, "Congratulations, Mama!" and I remember the spasm of anguish I felt as I thought how wrong he was. Now, I like to believe he was on a truer wavelength than I had ever visited. I imagine him knowing the whole story, and showing the same astonished delight I saw in Adam that Christmas morning when he unwrapped his batteries. This little boy may not look like what you asked for, the homeless man might have told me. He may not have the features you requested, or be able to perform all the right Harvard tricks. But put him in place, and he will light up your life. You have no idea how much magic is in him. -- From Expecting Adam by Martha Beck.
Local group had annual holiday party on Sunday. I'm about to go to a free lunch, I think. Kids are having holiday parties at school. I think that Wodehouse character may have phrased it about right, Christmas at our throats, again.
And what have we to look forward to? Well, we take Charlie in for just a pressure check to see how his glaucoma is behaving on the 23rd, the day before the day before Christmas. Wish us luck.
Then I guess we'll go on for another blood draw to recheck vitamin D level. Just too much fun for the holidays. But might as well get it over with.
I think two of my favorite Christmas pieces are the bits by George Will and Martha Beck I've tacked on below, both lifted from the Riverbend site,
www.altonweb.com/cs/downsyndrome/index.htm
But, in looking around for them, I found something I posted exactly 5 years ago today,
-----------
Yesterday Santa visited Charlie's special ed pre-school class. Charlie came home with a toy dump truck in his backpack, and in the bed of the dump truck were two artificial rocks. Truck and rocks are made of plastic; rocks are the color of light brown mustard, not the yellow stuff nor the really spicy stuff but the in-between flavor. When his mom took the truck out of his backpack, Charlie couldn't contain his excitement, was wiggling and giggling all over. He has this wicked little laugh, sounds like he thinks he just got away with something. We hear it every time he takes the first bite of an ice cream sandwich.
Charlie loves his new little truck and its rocks. Last evening looked like he was having one of his bears drive the truck. But he had entertained himself for much of the afternoon putting rocks in and taking rocks out and tasting them, rather bland I would think.
Charlie Brown was disappointed to find a rock in his Christmas stocking, but I think Charlie Black would be thrilled to get a rock in his. Reminds me of the story about Adam Beck choosing a gift from a favorite aunt as the present he was allowed to open one Christmas Eve and that present turning out to be the batteries she had wrapped separately from the toys and gadgets that needed batteries. Think Martha Beck and the aunt were inclined to let Adam pick another present, but he was having none of it, was too busy running around the house finding, with great delight, all the things the batteries could be used in.
What are you supposed to do with these kids? If we gave Charlie a lump of coal he'd probably love it, and make a mess. We'd have a little Black boy in blackface, and none too skillfully applied I'd guess.
We seem to be running a bit late with Christmas preparations in our house. I'd like to just cancel it this year, but Charlie's mom and siblings won't let me. And Charlie's mom has been nagging me about what we should get for this nephew, niece, teacher, therapist. Rocks! Can't imagine why I hadn't thought of it sooner. Give them all rocks. Maybe an assortment of natural and artificial, with various presentations. Charlie loves 'em. And if they're good enough for Charlie, then they're d**n well good enough for any and everybody else. ....
Charlie's mom and quite a few other people probably think I'm the one who deserves a lump of coal. Hmm, maybe I could shellac it with polyurethane and then let Charlie have it. A lump of coal would be fine by me and more than I expect. All this giving and decorating and celebrating are getting in the way of me enjoying Christmas. And I think I enjoy Christmas more than any other agnostic I know. And wouldn't want to let a silly thing like religion get in the way of something as important as Christmas.
I'd be happy to get a lump of coal and get Christmas giving over with. But what I really want this year is for the entire family, each and everyone of us, to get through this winter and spring without any flu or RSV. If I could have that with my lump of coal, I'd count myself way ahead in the giving and getting.
Happy and healthy holidays to all,
Bob
-------------
This year Jonathan Will, age 15, is getting the greatest gift that can be given: a friend. The fact that this friend, a large dog, does not need to be wrapped is but one of its merits. Her merits. Angel is a blond Labrador. About her, as about all members of that dignified species, there clings, like banker's worsted, the aura of knowing what is best but being too well-bred to insist on it. So she will improve the tone of the household, as she has done of Christmas.
"We shall soon be having Christmas at our throats," says a P. G. Wodehouse character who should be ashamed of himself. The routs and revels that erupt in connection with Christmas do take their toll on body and soul. Once you have had your fill of eggnog, which is easy to do, and once you have dusted from your shirt front the sugar from the pfeffernusse cookies, and once you have chewed through those gummy bits that make eating fruitcake such hard exercise, when you have done those things.
Furthermore, Christmas Eve invariably is a Walpurgisnacht of trips to drugstores for batteries that were not included in the box containing (you will discover on Christmas Day) 42,389 of the 42,390 parts in the do-it-yourself mainframe computer. On the box are printed those three terrible words: "Some Assembly Required."
Dogs come assembled and need no batteries. Blessed Angel is 6 and has graduated from finishing school and is ready to do what dogs do. A cynic once said that to his dog, every man is Napoleon, hence the popularity of dogs. Actually, no sensible person wants to feel like a Corsican brigand, so for "Napoleon" substitute, say, "Alan Greenspan." Dogs make us feel lofty but not so forbiddingly grand as to be unapproachable.
A philosophic dog like a Labrador will, if given half a chance, give to us the closest we are apt to come to unconditional love. Pedants may take issue with the ascription of love to an animal. But however we categorize what dogs do for us, it is what it is, and it comes down to this: our dogs are always glad to see us. They want to step high, wide and plentiful with us, and then doze in the sun in close proximity to us.
These days Jonathan is a boy of the great indoors, having discovered Bon Jovi (a rock group) and the teen-age pleasure of sovereignty in one's own room. Angel — who, by the way, is approximately the color of rich Devon cream — presumably will put up with a lot of Bon Jovi. But she also will insist on brisk walks, which will do both of them a world of good.
Jonathan is handicapped (Down's syndrome) and sometimes has trouble making his abundant thoughts and feelings understood by strangers. So at times, with poignant urgency, he has turned for companionship to a neighbor's dog, another blond Lab, named Skylab.
There is a large lesson here about the handicapped. Jon is just like everyone else, only a bit more so, in the following sense.
A shadow of loneliness is inseparable from the fact of individual existence. This shadow is perhaps somewhat darker for people like Jon because their ability to articulate — the ability by which we all cope with the apartness that defines our condition — is, even more than for most of us, not commensurate to their abilities to think and feel.
So Jon has found, as all dog lovers do, consolation in the company of a four-legged friend. If Skylab could speak — and, come to think about it, he does, with eloquent body language from tongue to tail — he would testify to the fact that Jon's handicap is no impediment to the flow of friendship.
In fact, watching the reciprocated pleasure between Jon and Skylab, I have come to a conclusion suited to this season. It is that some small mitigation of the harshness of life's lottery, some gently compensating thumb on the scale of justice, has given Jon an enlarged talent for friendship, with people and with their best friends.
So this year Jon gets Angel. Or Angel gets Jon, which is much the same thing. The unencumbered mutuality, the free flowing of giving between a dog and a boy, is a lesson in life's goodness, and the lesson is part of the greatest gift. -- George F. Will, The Washington Post, December 24, 1987, Page A15
-------------
My son Adam was diagnosed with Down syndrome two months before he was born, one gray winter day when I was a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Only hours after hearing the news, I waddled my pregnant self over to the library, hoping that researching my baby's condition could somehow calm the storm that raged inside me. As I walked across the campus, where I'd been a student since I was seventeen, the thought that my son would never go to college — not any college — numbed me, body and soul, until I hardly felt the cold.
Just outside of Harvard Yard, I stopped to drop some change into the outstretched hat of a ragged homeless man. He looked at my abdomen, flashed me a huge smile, and said, "Congratulations, Mamma!" I glanced around, not realizing for a moment that he was talking to me. I had already stopped believing that my pregnancy merited congratulations. At that moment, I thought of Adam as though he were a Christmas present that had broken before it was even unwrapped. If that man only knew, I thought bitterly.
Now, more than ten years later, I love the memory of the homeless man and his cheerful greeting. It's like looking back on a time of sickness to remind myself of the joy of getting well. Remembering my dread and fear helps me appreciate, all over again, the incredible gift I was given when Adam came along.
I felt this especially keenly the Christmas when Adam was five. As usual, all three of my children arose at an ungodly hour and descended on their gifts like locusts on an alfalfa field. Along with most other American parents, my husband John and I had spent a good part of the previous month tracking down the items our children had requested in their letters to Santa. Katie, the oldest, had asked for a set of bird calls she'd seen in an FAO Schwartz catalogue. Five-year-old Lizzie wanted one of those dolls they advertise on Saturday morning cartoons, the ones with repulsively cute names, that have been engineered to mimic the least pleasant behaviors of real human babies. I think that year Lizzie's doll had an anxiety-related bedwetting disorder or something. Adam wanted a whole brigade of toys with names like Cretin Slime Monsters.
In the proud tradition of delayed gratification my husband John had inherited from his Nordic ancestors, the children opened their presents one by one. Katie went first. The FAO Schwartz bird call set had turned out to cost several hundred dollars, so John and I had purchased what we thought was a reasonable facsimile. It didn't cover quite as broad an ornithological spectrum as the pricier set, but it could produce a great duck sound, a good owl, and several very convincing songbirds. When she saw it, Katie's face fell. It is an awful thing to see your kid's face fall on Christmas morning.
"Don't you like it?" I asked anxiously.
"No, no, it's okay. I like it." Katie smiled a stalwart smile, but her lower lip trembled ever so slightly. I began to feel that we should perhaps have taken out a second mortgage to pay for the FAO Schwartz bird-call set.
Lizzie went next. She tore the gift wrapping off her bedwetting doll, and then she, too, developed that troubled look around the eyes.
"What's the matter?" I said.
"Well," said Lizzie, "it's not exactly what I asked for."
John, who had fought his way through about seventeen toy stores looking for that particular doll, burst out, "I thought you wanted a Tiny Whiny Princess Wee-Wee!"
"I did," said Lizzie in her precocious little voice, "but I wanted the one with the pink jewels, and this one only has the purple jewels."
Within minutes, both the girls had reconciled themselves to their gifts. Like their pioneer forebears, many of whom had died crossing the Great Plains on foot in the dead of winter, dragging their possessions behind them in handcarts, my daughters were able to steel themselves to the brutal realities of an imperfect world. This was good, because I had been on the verge of sending them both to military school.
Now it was Adam's turn. He fished around under the Christmas tree until he found a package with his name on it. He tore the paper off, holding his breath, and found—batteries. An eight-pack of double D's, still encased in plastic.
"Oh, honey," I said, "that's not the real present. The real present is—"
But Adam didn't hear me. He was staring at those batteries as if they were so magnificent he couldn't quite take them in. His mouth fell open in astonished ecstasy as he held the batteries up to the light.
"Oh, wow!" he said. "Oh, wow! Mom, look! Batteries!" (Actually, it sounded more like, "Mom, ook! Aggabies!" but the meaning was clear.
Before we could divert his attention to any other gift, Adam leapt to his feet and began running around the house, locating every appliance, tool, and toy that ran on batteries. The whole time, he babbled excitedly about all the things he could do with this fabulous, fabulous gift. As we watched, it began to occur to all of us "normal" people in the family that batteries really were a pretty darn good Christmas present. They didn't look like much, on the face of it, but think what they could do! Put them in place, and inanimate objects suddenly came to life, moving, talking, singing, lighting up the room. Something about Adam always manages to see straight past the outward ordinariness of a thing to any magic it may hold inside.
So this has become part of my holiday ritual: every winter I go back to that terrible December day when I learned that I was about to become the mother of a retarded child. I hear the homeless man saying, "Congratulations, Mama!" and I remember the spasm of anguish I felt as I thought how wrong he was. Now, I like to believe he was on a truer wavelength than I had ever visited. I imagine him knowing the whole story, and showing the same astonished delight I saw in Adam that Christmas morning when he unwrapped his batteries. This little boy may not look like what you asked for, the homeless man might have told me. He may not have the features you requested, or be able to perform all the right Harvard tricks. But put him in place, and he will light up your life. You have no idea how much magic is in him. -- From Expecting Adam by Martha Beck.