Long time since I blogged.\u00a0 I’ve been obsessively trying to make Nat’s group home a reality.\u00a0 I’ve been traveling (to Provence, which feels like a fairy tale).\u00a0 And I’ve been trying not to deal with Max going off to college. But it is imminent.<\/p>\n
My relationship with Max is a good, solid one.\u00a0 He was easy to raise.\u00a0 My main concerns were that he not be too much the Middle Child stereotype, or the Sibling of a Disabled Child stereotype, both of which are about not making any trouble.\u00a0 I also worried that he did not get enough of the right attention from me; that no matter what I tried, I was probably still psychologically occupied with Nat.<\/p>\n
One way that I spent time with Max and Nat, which was not too difficult, was to take them to stores and to the mall.\u00a0 Not that I would buy myself clothes or anything; I would just wheel them in the double-stroller, and later, walk them into the food court, after we looked at the glass elevator that showed how everything worked.\u00a0 Max cared about these things; Nat was quiet about them.<\/p>\n
The mall we visited most often was Cambridgeside Galleria, in North Cambridge.\u00a0 It was very close to Lotus, where Ned used to work.\u00a0 We had one car in those days, and so I needed to take him to work if I was to have a car that day.\u00a0 On those days, I would take the boys to the Galleria.\u00a0 We had our routine, of course.\u00a0 Nat and Max both love routines, even though only one of them is autistic.\u00a0 People in general love routines and traditions, and that’s what our Galleria jaunts were.\u00a0 I’d take them to the Burger King for dinner, after a stop at Mrs. Field’s cookies.\u00a0 We would marvel at the huge flat chocolate chip cookie in the case.\u00a0 I would buy them chocolate chip cookie cupcakes; I can’t remember much about them except colorful fluffy frosting.<\/p>\n
The Burger King was particularly good in terms of the toys that came with the kids’ meals.\u00a0 Back then, Toy Story One was very big with us, and a theme with Burger King more than once.\u00a0 Because we went practically every week that year, we amassed quite a collection of Toy Story characters.\u00a0 At one point we had tiny Buzz Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear in a little rocket, giant Buzz Lightyear in the box like the one in the movie, and a Buzz Lightyear costume.\u00a0 Maxie was Buzz Lightyear through and through.<\/p>\n
After a while, life changed, and we stopped going there.\u00a0 The Galleria was a bit scuzzy, I realized.\u00a0 I didn’t miss it.<\/p>\n
Things are so different now.\u00a0 I shop online or at The Atrium, an upscale mall in Chestnut Hill. No one eats Burger King in my family, especially Max, who is a vegetarian.\u00a0 He also carefully monitors his junk food and sugar because as a kid he would get such stomach aches and nausea from that stuff.\u00a0 We got rid of the Toy Story box of toys long ago, at a yard sale.\u00a0 Mostly Max has his own life — already, even though he has lived his gap year with us.\u00a0 He drives, he goes out and stays out late.\u00a0 His girlfriend is often here.\u00a0 I adore her, and she is like a part of the family.\u00a0 But I have missed Max in the last year, even though he is still here.<\/p>\n
Today I needed to go to Cambridgeside because it was one of the few places with a Travelex counter.\u00a0 I needed to exchange the euros on the Travelex card that I had bought in preparation for Provence. I invited Max to come, just spontaneously.\u00a0 He said “sure;”\u00a0 he still likes to shop.<\/p>\n
In the car our conversation was awkward sometimes, with most conversations originating with me.\u00a0 But when we shut the doors of the car, Max said, “Is there a cookie store here?\u00a0 Somehow I always associate parking garage smells with cookies.”<\/p>\n
I looked at him in surprise, but why should he remember Mrs. Fields’ Cookies?\u00a0 “Oh yeah!” I said, and told him about our tradition of getting the cookie there.\u00a0 “Hmm,” he said.<\/p>\n
We went to the Travelex counter, where they gave me $740 in cash; no checks, no putting it back on the debit card.\u00a0 We then went to Best Buy, then Borders, which was having a huge close-out sale, and then we split up.\u00a0 He eventually joined me at the Gap and I spent a bundle of that cash on his college clothes and stuff for Ben.\u00a0 I started to get tired of being there, and we left.<\/p>\n
Back in the garage I remembered the smell, and the cookies.\u00a0 “Oh!”\u00a0 I said.\u00a0 “The cookies!\u00a0 We forgot!”<\/p>\n
Max, in his usual laid back way shrugged.\u00a0 “Do you want one?”\u00a0 I asked.\u00a0 “I don’t need one,” he said, predictably.<\/p>\n
We walked a few more steps, a sad pressure growing in my chest.\u00a0 In ten days he’d be in college.\u00a0 It had been years since we had been at the Galleria; who knew how many more it would take to come back — if any?\u00a0 Not that I loved the place.\u00a0 But I love Max, and I loved his memory of it.<\/p>\n
“Let’s go back,” I said, as we dumped our Gap bags into the trunk.\u00a0 He hesitated.\u00a0 “Come on, why not?”\u00a0 We went back to the doors and took the elevator to the street level stores.\u00a0 We went in the wrong direction and then found the signs for the food court.\u00a0 As we came to the Food Court, I looked left and there, in ugly pink and orange, where Mrs. Fields should have been, was a Dunkin’ Donuts.\u00a0 “Oh,” I said.\u00a0 “I guess we can’t expect that a cookie store would last that long.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” said Max.<\/p>\n
“Do you want a frozen yogurt?”\u00a0 I gestured to the stand to the right.\u00a0 But I knew he’d say no.\u00a0 There’s only so much effort Max will make for sugary food these days.\u00a0 We walked back through the mall, and stopped to look at the elevator.\u00a0 It went so far down, ending in black metal darkness.\u00a0 “Wow,” I said.\u00a0 I’d never noticed that, or maybe I’d forgotten.<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” he said.\u00a0 “It really is cool.\u00a0 Look how you can see everything, even the huge counter weights.”\u00a0 We marveled in silence.\u00a0 Then we went back to the car, and drove home chatting comfortably.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Long time since I blogged.\u00a0 I’ve been obsessively trying to make Nat’s group home a reality.\u00a0 I’ve been traveling (to Provence, which feels like a fairy tale).\u00a0 And I’ve been trying not to deal with Max going off to college. But it is imminent. My relationship with Max is a good, solid one.\u00a0 He was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-xN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2095"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2100,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095\/revisions\/2100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}