Dreaming

I had a dream last night — the details have become sort of vague with distance (isn't that always the way?), but I remember reading a newspaper. The physical sensation of holding it, the smell of the ink, the type on the page. I remember reading several articles, each created from my mind. This rich tapestry of a world, with physical and intellectual stimulation, had been woven entirely within my dream.

Unproductive

It has been a spectacularly unproductive week, despite the endless series of small tasks and appointments and distractions that were attended to, as this has kept me from doing the actual work that needed to be done. And as the week draws to a close, I'm beginning to feel just a bit anxious.

(Perhaps I can redeem myself over the weekend.)

Flu

I haven't been all that concerned about the flu. I suppose I might be if I were still commuting into New York, but even then, I probably still wouldn't think much about it. It's just isn't in my nature to worry over a problem before it becomes a problem. I was discussing this with someone in the medical profession, sharing our frustration with panic and overreaction.

Many years ago, long before this present anxiety over the potential for pandemic, even before fears of bird flu had entered the popular culture, I started reading Flu. It's a terrific book, though I had to put it aside about the time my son was born. (It would be years before I was finally able to finish it.)

It was from this book that I first learned of the 1918 flu pandemic. These days, most people are aware of that event, if only in vague, frightening detail. But as recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, it was as though it had been almost completely forgotten. (I don't even recall it being discussed during the flu panic of the mid-1970s.) It came as a startling revelation to me.

We have this peculiar custom of making our grief public — politicizing it, even celebrating it. In the United States alone, estimates are that a quarter of the population was afflicted by the 1918 pandemic, and 500,000 to 675,000 people died as a result — yet there are no memorials, no days of remembrance. The sole legacy of that event seems to be the "living room" (this came to replace "front parlor," at the suggestion of Ladies Home Journal, as that had been the room where people customarily left the bodies of the dead.) Most people aren't even aware of the origins of that term.

It still seems remarkable to me that such a significant event was so quickly and intentionally forgotten. One explanation suggests the rapid pace of the virus (most of the victims in the United States died within a period of less than nine months); another that significant incidents of disease were not uncommon in that era. (Typhoid, yellow fever, diphtheria, and cholera outbreaks all occurred around that same time.) But it's difficult to imagine such an incident could pass today without being commemorated.

Maybe that's the better way, though. You suffer and you mourn and you grieve, but that passes. And you get on with your life.

Mainstream

My six-year-old is officially being Mainstreamed. We had a meeting this morning at the school to discuss it.

I should explain: since entering public school, my son has been in smaller special education classes, part of a program designed for children with Autism. As this year has progressed, bit by bit, he's been doing more work with a larger (mainstream) 1st Grade class. He's spent the past few weeks with that class for the entire school day ― a change that, quite honestly, seems to have crept up on us, somehow. (It isn't that we weren't consulted, or that we weren't aware, but it all seemed to happen rather unexpectedly.)

He'll continue with that larger class through the end of the year (shadowed by a Teaching Assistant, to provide guidance where necessary), and when he begins 2nd Grade in late August or early September ― I forget which ― it will be with a larger class, from the beginning.

This is good news for so many reasons, news we've been anxious to hear. For a start, this means he'll share the same academic environment as his peers. He's very capable and bright (in some ways, even more so than others his age), but he needs to be engaged and challenged as much as encouraged ― and I think it's important that this happen now, while he's still young. That, and I believe he'll be in a much better position to address the issues that remain ― navigating social interactions with others, for example ― while surrounded by typical kids.

There are times I think I'm the only parent I know with an Autistic child that isn't engaged in an adversarial relationship with their respective school district. Moving to a mainstream class has always been the goal, but I've never — well, almost never ― felt all that impatient about it. I've been confident in the care and attention my son has received, and I've never had any doubts, though part of that, I'm sure, is because he is comparatively mildly affected. (He'll be only the third child to graduate from this program over the course of three or four years.)

May 23, 2003

For Rent

The house at the end of the street had a sign put up this week — it's for rent. It's only a small house, on a tiny plot of land, but it seems familiar and cozy, from the outside, at least. This area was once a vacation community, long ago, where people would spend a few weeks or months during the summer, in small houses near the lake. In time, people came to live here year round, and the small houses were replaced by larger ones, though traces of the original community still remain. Many of these small houses have been purchased and restored over the past several years.

I don't know who had been living there. (I don't know all that much about most of my neighbors, really.) From time to time, I've seen a woman come and go, as I've driven past, and I believe she had a young daughter, perhaps other children. I wonder what's become of them. Where did they go? Were they evicted, because she was unable to pay the rent? Or was there another, more hopeful reason?

Cookies

Are the boxes of Girl Scout Cookies getting smaller? Or am I just eating them too fast?

In case you were wondering (and I'm sure you were, as you can't mention Girl Scout Cookies without the question coming up), I'm partial to Samoas.