Two ways to learn more about Asperger's

Over the years I've worked with several students who have been on the Autism spectrum, and looking back to my childhood before society's growing understanding of Autism, I'm sure I encountered people with this condition. John Elder Robison describes in his memoir Look me in the eye  about growing up in time when being different resulted in his being mis-labeled as a deviant, being told by his teachers and parents that he wouldn't amount to much, and bullied by classmates. It didn't help that his parents themselves struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. In the end John Elder, as his family called him, left school and home at an early age. Luckily, for him, he had a talent, a gift, some would even say a genius for electronics and that saved him.

It was the late 60s early 70s and John Elder began to hang out on the local music scene where he brought his talents to bear in repairing and enhancing sound systems. As his knowledge grew so did his reputation. He eventually became an employee of the rock band KISS developing trick guitars and effects. Wishing to settle down and get married, he walked away from the music industry and went to work in manufacturing as an electronics developer. All the while he continued to struggle with feeling different and trying to deal with interactions with other people.

Finally a friend suggested that he may in fact have something called Asperger's. Reading up on the subject John Elder came to see that there was a name for what he experienced in his life, and that there were older people like him. Over the years and with the birth of his son he learned how to adapt his behavior to what we consider more socially acceptable. The powerful lesson here is for the reader, Robison vividly explains how his mind works. It is only through sharing our inner workings that we can learn about others. There have been many times I've sat and wondered how other people think, do they see what I see, do they hear what I hear, or do they feel the same sensations as I do? Robison has become a successful businessman, husband, father, author, and now advocate for Aspergerians. We all need to learn about Autism and how it impacts the lives of those with the disorder and the people who love them.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion is a novel featuring a character who doesn't even know he has Asperger's. Don Tillman is a professor of genetics who lives a very regimented life - practical clothes, planned menu for every day of the week, and times everything in his daily schedule for optimal efficiency. At the beginning of the book he is asked to fill in at a lecture to a group of children and their families about Asperger's so that his philandering friend Gene can cheat on his wife - well they do supposedly have an open marriage. Don does some research, gives the talk, relates with the children, but angers the parents and the woman who had organized the lecture, all not seeing that he himself is undiagnosed with Asperger's.

Don gets the brilliant idea to create a questionnaire in order to find a wife. Gene wanting to throw a spoke in Don's wheel sends him Rosie a woman who definitely will not fill Don's requirements for a wife. The rest of the story as you may guess is the growing friendship and eventual love between Don and Rosie with many ups and downs along the way. Don learns how to deal with one of the greatest challenges for people with Asperger's - how to deal with people when you can't interpret the social cues of facial expressions, body language or spoken figurative language. All these things don't make sense in Don's mind and here again is the lesson for the reader - not everyone's brain works the same. We can't expect everyone to behave the same for none of us is the same. We are not all programed the same way for we are not factory made, we are the result of a lot of chemical reactions which don't always work the same. Doesn't make one of us better than the other - just different and our world would be a much better place if we all could understand this and embrace the differences.

Coffee and books - the elixirs of Life

How Starbucks Saved my Life
Michael Gates Gill

Picked up a memoir to read over my February break from school, Michael Gates Gill's How Starbucks Saved My Life: A son of privilege learns to live like everyone else.  Now first of all I must be honest, as a New Englander, if I buy coffee out (Yankee thrift means I brew my own at home) I tend to prefer Dunkin Doughnuts to Starbucks. There I said it. I'm sure that will lead to lots of controversy. Point is I don't think you have to be a coffee drinker to appreciate the lessons that Gill learned and shared in his honest account of putting together his life after being fired from his long-time, high flying, well paid job as an advertising executive; divorce from his wife of many years with whom he had four children, and fathering of a fifth child with a woman he'd had an affair with, which contributed to his divorce. Alone and broke he found himself in his local Starbucks being asked by a young African American woman if he was looking for a job. His answer was simple - yes.

Gill was the son of wealthy, well-connected parents. His memoir is sprinkled with names of the famous people he met through his parents, as well as, the people he met in his own professional life after having attended the right school (Yale) and getting the right job (hired by another alumnus). But it didn't matter who he knew on the day he realized that he'd really screwed up his life because those people were no longer able to offer him the assistance he most needed - a job. Now he was a man who needed income and health insurance benefits, especially after learning that he had a rare tumor that was impacting his hearing. So he started his new job at the bottom. Afraid of screwing up he accepted cleaning chores and found them to be concrete tasks that he felt confident of being able to successfully complete. His manager worked him slowly up the task that he feared the most - waiting on customers and running the cash register. Eventually he would find a niche serving as a coffee ambassador and to the most challenging of all - making of the espresso drinks.

With each new hurdle, Gill shared a memory about a similar challenge in his earlier life, or more like seeing the situation from the side he'd previously been on. Now he was the student,  the minority,  the employee, or the invisible. I read how he learned so many of life's many painful lessons late in life and how had he been open to these lessons earlier in his life how different it would have been. Lessons in how to be a better husband, father, mentor, or member of society.

Sometimes we need to lose everything in order to start fresh and learn a new way of living. Many a recovering addict (insert addiction type here) will tell you that they had to hit bottom before they could take on Step 1 (admitted I was powerless and my life was unmanageable) and start the long road back to sanity. But there are others who say that you can start changing your life no matter where you are on the road. Reading this memoir was a reminder that I don't need to wait for the bad times for me to tackle change in my life. Change can happen any time as long as we are open to the signs, the lessons, the teachers, and the desire.

Memoirs: Gardening vs. Farming

Produce and chicken purchased
at local Farmer's market

I've spent quite a bit of time reading gardening memoirs this summer which have helped to inspire me in my perennial gardens. I've enjoyed researching the plants that have been written about and compared my plantings to those of the authors, but when it comes to farming that is a whole new ball game. I'm a gardener not a farmer.

My vegetable garden

Kristin Kimball's The Dirty Life is a love story, one with the man who would become her husband and with the land they came to farm. Kimball first met her future husband while on a writing assignment. Here was a girl from New York exposed to the fields of Pennsylvania and a whole new world opened up before her. She decided to go out on a limb and leave the life that she knew to go and reclaim a farm in northern New York. Her future husband, Mark, had a dream of creating a farm where people could buy shares of the harvest, but unlike many other programs this one would provide an entire diet - fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs, beef, pork, chicken, maple syrup, grains, flours, and herbs.  

Squash

This meant that the two of them would need to get the fields plowed and planted. Mark wanted to work the farm without machinery so the couple had to first find a pair of draft horses and the appropriate equipment. Next came the establishment of their herd and a chicken coop. Kristin and Mark divided the labor and Kristin studied up on animal husbandry and learned how to care for and slaughter the animals that they raised. It was a challenge which was rewarded with success.

Kimball writes of the heartaches and fears that establishing their new farm brought to her and Mark. She revels in their triumphs and happiness. I'll let you enjoy their story.

As for me, I have slowly but surely begun the process of growing more vegetables for my family, and like most home gardeners, being overrun with zucchini has become my fate. I'm thrilled because I'm actually getting tomatoes this year. Last year we didn't have much of a garden as I fell sick in May from a tick borne illness and didn't really recover until July and as a result we didn't get too much done in the garden. With the desire to expand my vegetable raising horizons, I am doing my research and have discovered a way to grow potatoes in a tower of hay and compost contained within chicken wire, and I plan to try it out next spring. In the meantime I continue to work my compost pile in order to be ready.

With the recent Market Basket problems, I have depended more and more on my local Farmer's Market for my produce and even my meat. A farm here in town sells beef, pork, and chicken and although expensive I've decided to make the switch and will probably not go back to shopping for meat at the store. By the way I recommend reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle  as a way to learn about what it means to be a locavore, and any of Michael Pollan's work which will make you think about where your food comes from.

Memoir - Under Magnolia

My baby picture

Growing up in New England, I had a different experience than that of Frances Mayes as described in her newest memoir Under Magnolia. I'm always a bit fascinated by stories that take place in the South, it seems almost like a foreign country to me, points of reference can be so different. Sometimes I can relate and other times I can't.

Mayes' has a few years on me as well, she was in college when I was born, so my experience of growing up female is much different than hers. I certainly wasn't a tomboy, but my father taught me to fish, mow the lawn, shingle a roof, build a campfire, and that an education was essential and that I most certainly was going off to college to earn my degree. Mom taught me how to keep house, cook (baking wasn't her favorite so when I got adept at it I was the chief dessert maker), sew, knit, do needlepoint, garden, and encouraged me to get that education while I was young. My mother's family couldn't afford to send her to college, but she did earn her degree in her late thirties.

Mayes relates her first experience with visiting a funeral home and I was immediately transported to the funeral parlor (as we called it) in Rhode Island from which all my relatives were buried. There is a smell to funeral homes, some might call it death, but that's not it. There is no smell of decay. It is a smell which I cannot describe. It looks more like death; the woodwork stained dark, the velvet curtains which covered the windows which kept the outside light from making its way in, or the pedestrians from looking in at the bereaved. The embossed wall paper that was popular during the time the place was decorated, made the place depressing. Unfortunately during my childhood so many of my relatives passed away that the funeral parlor was a familiar place. There were few happy occasions for gathering together.

Vacations at the beach were a happy time for Mayes. There is a real sense of freedom at the beach. I too had many happy times at the beach. They were solitary times as my parents worked to maintain the cottages that my father and his friend had bought as investments. After helping out where I could, I was free to go to the beach where I would walk for miles or go for a swim. I scoured the line of pebbles that split the beach from the sandy bottom further out in the water, for shells and sea glass. My territory was marked by a white house with blue shutters at one end and a pink beach house at the other with no others in between. Very few people came down this way, the public beach was well up the road.

One last thing, Mayes, wrote about the suicides that took place in town while she was growing up. She and her family didn't talk much about them, but they did wonder and look at those families differently. I was a member of one of those families that folks look at and talk about. I wonder what they said about us. It's hard to grow up with that pain in your household, for even there we did not talk about those that we loved who chose to leave us behind.

I'm feeling a little sheepish today

I've read memoirs written by women who have raised cows, chickens, children, vegetables, fruits, and lots of flowers so why not add sheep to the mix. Catherine Friend's sheepish: Two women, Fifty sheep & Enough Wool to Save the Planet was a can't put down read for me. Friend mixes lots of information about this animal, its history, its role in the environment, its role in businesses and products, and its role in her life. She hadn't meant to be a farmer but for the love of her partner she consented to running a farm and vineyard in Minnesota.

The challenges that these women face are various: weather, finding help during the busy shearing or lambing seasons, the chores, their health, and their relationship. For me I was fascinated with the idea that she was reevaluating her life as we all do during middle age. What was her passion? Part of it was her writing. She admitted that farming wasn't what she expected and not her passion but her partner's. She fantasized of selling up the farm, buying an RV and taking to the road. I had that fantasy once, then we rented an RV for a week's summer vacation and that cured me.

Friend wrote about fiber fanatics and how uncomfortable they made her. Yet as the book unfolds, she is slowly drawn into the world of fleece, yarn, dyeing, spinning, weaving, and even knitting. She reconnects with the sheep and the farm through a new appreciation for the way in which her sheep's wool can bring her into a colorful world. I can appreciate that myself as I am drawn to fabric for quilting, yarn for knitting (both of these things I've done in the past but not so much lately) and my all time favorite hobby - cross stitch. I love to see the patterns of color develop on what was once a blank canvas, almost like a photograph slowly developing.

I hate to admit I'm reaching middle age, but it is true. Even menopause is looming on the horizon. I'm grateful to Friend and her honest sharing of her struggles with "the change," with a long term relationship, and with trying to figure out what you want to do next with your life. As she wrote there may not be an answer in the latest self-help book or memoir but sometimes you can be inspired to keep going knowing that others are in the same place that you are.