Susan Senator

You are like the hurricane
There’s calm in your eye.
–Neil Young

I just watched Nat crouch as he walked down the front path to the bus, trying to avoid the heavy raindrops. Such a mensch. He hates the rain, hates the fact that his brothers stay in bed while he has to go to school, hates the fact that Ned and I eat our breakfast sometime later than him; yet he just does what he’s got to do. He did ask me several times if the rain would stop and if it was still summer and we were still going to Colorado. I just wanted to crush him to me and kiss his fuzzy face! I see how anxious he is, and yet he just totally held himself together. I could learn a lot from his fortitude.

I am not quite as stoic. I feel battered by the winds blowing through my life right now. My expectations have been laid low to the ground, in anticipation of the next storm. But give me a few days of son-light, and I forget all about the hurricanes.

Today I am going to write, but it is going to be fiction. That’s the way it goes. Before Making Peace With Autism, I wrote novel after novel. Historical shit (I have a Master’s in 19th Century Russian Intellectual History from Penn; my thesis was about Tolstoy’s worldview — I disagreed with Sir Isaiah Berlin, of “Hedgehog and Fox” fame — in War and Peace, which I read in Russian, da, koneshno) with convoluted plots. But there was also a huge dry spell of nothing. Ned and I have a joke, where he says, “I’m not a software engineer anymore,” and I say, “I’m not a writer.” Because we both have our days of desert and drek, when he can’t think of anything to blog or new cute little programs to write. And I just stare at Precious’ vacuous face and I want to snap her lid shut or strangle her with her clunky white cord.

During those times, we just gotta do other things. We gotta be like Nat and remind ourselves that it is still summer, thank God, even though the air smells fishy and thick. Somewhere out there, crisp and clear Colorado and Cape Cod cavort, just waiting for us to join them. Have to crouch and go out into the fish stew first to get there, as Nat already knows.