Dear You...

If you're reading this, it no doubt means you've had something to do with helping me care for and teach the two biggest miracles possible in my life. For me, those miracles are named are Grace Rosemary and Calvin Michael Stroh-Simon (the Magnificents). But you can think of anyone's miracles, yours and everyone's, along with mine as you read my note to you.

All week long I've meant to drop you a line and send this cyber hug and feel you hug me in return.  I'm having a hard time handling this week, and I know I'm not alone.  But I've been feeling FIERCE love and appreciation for the people into whose loving hands I place my miracles when my hands don't have enough hands.  I hope you're feeling that love on an enormous scale, and I hope it somehow makes such a painful and frightening time to be on this planet maybe a little less painful and frightening.

I found myself getting a little...let's call it "vehement" on Facebook right after "the incident."  I kept seeing and hearing over and over about how the problem is that we don't let God into our schools, and I guess by extension into our lives, and that's why we're in the mess we're in. And I suddenly knew that I had to get something off my chest before I lost my mind. Not to hurt anybody's feelings, or to be mean spirited about anybody's belief. I hope no one took it that way. It just felt necessary for my sanity, such as it is.  I'll share it here, it might resonate for you:

I don't want to do this. I really don't want to do this. But I'm going to do it. I'm going to come out and say that if I hear one more suggestion that this tragedy is the result of a banishment of God from our schools I will scream. God is not absent from schools. My children are not led through any so-called prayers in school, but they are surrounded by love and kindness every day that they are there, and THAT is God, folks. So let's stop using this horrific event to piss and moan over some imagined attack on organized religion running rampant in our world. Some of the most saintly people you will ever meet don't know the words to any commonly sanctioned prayers and have never set foot into any houses of worship. This horrific event was the result of a person losing complete touch with who he was, losing complete touch with reality, losing complete touch with Love. Let's just get it straight, shall we, and get to the business of creating a world where we take care of each other on a consistent basis because we're all freaking HUMANS no matter where our parents decided to take us on Fridays or Saturdays or Sundays while we were growing up. (Steps down from soapbox a little sheepishly but couldn't keep her mouth shut.)

Some of my friends have asked if they could share this post because it matches how they are feeling, and I am completely comfortable with that. It's not as if words are adequate, or that there's any sense to be made of what's happened. Sometimes I even feel guilty about the level of devastation I'm feeling.  After all, what right do I have to walk around shellshocked and agonized? "My" people weren't there.

But if I'm feeling this way, and if you are too...somewhere deep down we must know something that we don't know we know about who "our people" actually are. So if you're wondering why you're waking up in the mornings like you slept the night through with a few tons of bricks on your chest, this pesky inner knowing might have something to do with it.

Maybe it feels familiar, something like how you starting feeling back in September 2001 and haven't really been able to shake since.

Or after seeing those people, lives that numbered into the 6-digits, washed out into the Indian Ocean while we were still unwrapping Christmas presents back in 2004.

Or what about August 2005--were you like me, were you watching, right on your own TV screens, thousand upon thousands of abandoned souls waiting on their roofs for help that never came right here in the United States of America? Feeling vaguely sorry if, like me, you'd never made it to New Orleans, because so far as you could tell, it might be gone forever?

How were you doing while we were all looking in on Japan last year as it drowned in the Pacific Ocean, and had to keep reminding ourselves that it wasn't a movie we were watching, that the participants were not actors?

How about the year before while we all watched Port-au-Prince crumble? Did you seriously consider adopting a Haitian child, and maybe actually do so?

Have you been in a movie theater since July 20th just this past summer? Maybe to take your kids to the latest 3d extravaganza? Did it feel different than ever before like it did for me?  I didn't want to have to mentally plan an executable escape route while watching the previews before Hotel Transylvania, I love the previews, but I did what I had to do.

And what about back in October when you heard there was a woman out in Staten Island whose preschoolers were ripped out of her arms and washed away forever, while her first-responder husband was elsewhere saving the lives of other children, and all because someone wouldn't open his door and let them in. We're told that the man in the house turned his back to his sliding glass door to make it easier on himself as she pounded and screamed and begged for help. I wonder if that worked for him. I wonder if he's had a moment's peace since. I wonder if I can ever be good enough to wrap my head around the compassion I need to feel for that man, maybe above all others, or else accept that I'm a total hypocrite.

Do you remember where you were when you saw the first pictures out of Columbine?  I do too. Cancun. My first and only Caribbean vacation. I was hoping I wasn't understanding right, but unfortunately my Spanish is good and I couldn't unhear what I'd heard.

Maybe you're like me and one of your dearest friends is from Syria...and while you can call your mother, or email her, or drive a piddly 60 miles to have her hold you, your friend is lucky if she can somehow get word that her mom and her dad and her sisters and her brothers and untold numbers of family members that are lodged in her heart are living safely in a home that is still standing.

I could go on. By now you're probably begging me to stop.

Minute by minute in these times we're living in, times when we can see human suffering on the other side of the world in HD so vivid it's hardly discernible from what you can touch in the room you're sitting in, I'm feeling the need to get the word out, in any way I can, that not only are we here for each other, but that being here for each other has become mandatory. Not some nicey nice sounding Hallmark platitude. Nope. Inarguably and permanently mandatory. And guess what,  we no longer have the luxury of being shy about it. You don't get to feel self-conscious or tentative about it anymore, not if you want the world to survive another winter. Sorry, but those days are gone. You can't even hate people who cut you off in traffic and do stupid, STUPID crap on the roads, not anymore, not if you know what's good for you. You have to unlearn the lie that they're just idiots in other cars that you'll never see and don't mean anything to you. This may be the hardest thing you ever teach yourself. And by "you" I of course mean "me." But I think you're catching my drift.

I'm not talking Nobel peace prize winning behavior either, that's for sure. I don't know about you, but I can't do that.  But I can smile at a bank teller before I  take the money and run. If you're funny, make a harried retail worker at a check-out counter laugh by making a goofy joke.  And for the love-a Mike,  for goshsakes, how about some eye contact while we're at it.  We have become so comfortable not doing this...comfortable with saving our kindness for "our people," like greedy grasping misers who only have so much good will to spare, so better to save it for the people we have to live and work with or we'll run out.  We've become so unused to connecting with people this way that we're almost embarrassed when we do it. But I have a theory that you can't make eye contact with people and not remember that they are "your" people  -- maybe at levels so deep that you don't notice that you know this,  but that's ok, it still works. It's become as vital as clean air and drinkable water that we get this straight, hasn't it?  And so many of us know this already. You know even if you don't know you know. I don't know anything you don't know, I just happen to be more verbose than most. I should be baking right now, I have 6 batches of from-scratch unbaked cookie dough waiting in my 'frige. But instead I'm sitting here running off at the mouth to you. Because for me, written words help get me there. For you, it could be anything that gets you there.  So song as you get there.

If you want to pass these thoughts along, if it feels comfortable to you, go ahead.  Whether it's to someone who works in school and doesn't know how they're making it through the day, or someone who knows and loves people who work in school and don't know how they're making it through the day...well, that doesn't leave anybody out, does it? I guess that's my point.

All my love and support and appreciation and hugs and even kisses (restraining orders be damned),

Your friend,

Tracy

p.s. If you're sick of everything being so heavy and you can't take it anymore and need a break, read the post right before this one about how and why I fell on my ass in my shower the other day, you will laugh at me and it will help.
http://everlovingmess.blogspot.com/2012/12/from-tracys-little-book-of-perils-of.html

From Tracy's Little Book of the Perils of Autism...

Peril number 52,052 as follows:

Ahem.

I'll keep this short and sweet, because I'm on a few different painkillers and just a little bit of cough syrup (and I don't have a cough, just wanted a nice li'l chaser).

If you have an  autistic child who likes to play with gooey textured things, and SO many do, there may come a day when he or she will sneak away for a few seconds and fill your bathtub with invisible hair conditioner.

Or what I now like to call the gooey textured version of carbon monoxide.

So, rule number one: Enough already with the dye-free, fragrance-free, safe for your body and the environment crap. What are you, a fucking hippie? Ok, fine, be that way. If you want to end up a confused, wet, naked, slippery, rageful, hot, horizontal mess in your bathtub, just go ahead and BE THAT WAY, you have my blessing, I've warned you, go with God, yer gonna need er.

Now I know how alluring this sounds to you. So go ahead, picture it, get it out of your systems, perverts. I'll give you a minute to slobber over yourselves or I'll never get your attention back.

[A minute.]

Good, all done, so onward.

I don't know why he's trying to kill me. I seriously do not get it. He doesn't know how to unlock the refrigerator yet, so I truly do not understand.

The best part of the plot is that less than 24 hours previous to the great conditioner caper, he'd done it with shampoo. Unlike the conditioner, the shampoo had color. And fragrance. STRONG fragrance. (Yeah, this one was NON-non-toxic, there's only so much I can afford, what do I look like, Rockefeller? Shut the fuck up.)

So when the whole upstairs began to reek like a French whorehouse, I got suspicious. And what to my wondering eyes did appear but a thick layer of glistening blue Smurf-jizz coating my bathtub.

(Oh don't cringe, grow up, Smurfs do it too, it's just natural...and once Smurfette wised up and moved to Provincetown, well, that's a whole nuther story for a whole nuther day...luckily most of the boy Smurfs are gay, and don't act all shocked like you didn't know this already, or as if there's anything wrong with it, it's 2012 for Smurf's sake.)

Anywho, get this, I CLEANED it. Immediately. Don't think I haven't forgotten the incident...that fateful afternoon in our adorable little Pelham apartment, 8 short weeks before my wedding when I almost died or at least almost became a quadraplegic because I stood on one leg to shave the other one (still have flashbacks, I sit down for that now). I mean, you all know me well enough at this point, I'm not one for wasting time cleaning up messes that ain't goin nowheres, but I got on this one, tout suite, Smurf-jizz abated, all clear.

But then...

Ha, said all the evil sprites and pixies that revel in my embarrassing naked mishappery. Ha ha ha ha HA, they all said.

So, in closing, quick note to my mother, who will probably read this at some point. I know what you will say, excellent mother. That there is absolutely NOTHING funny about this story. That I could have been killed, brained on the soap holder as it crashed against my unwitting skull. And without even having shaved my wintertime monkey legs, that's how they'd've found me, the unkindest cut of all. All true.

However, since my brain, or what's left of it, has somehow, against all odds, managed to remain on the inside of said skull, you'd better all be giggling your asses off by now, or the chain of misadventures I like to call my life will not have fulfilled its holy purpose.

As for now, I'm off to find a nice safe place to sit and shave my legs.

[Oh, and Mommy...I'm really sorry I said Smurf-jizz to the whole world-wide-world...love ya, me.]

Today I Hate Myself Because...

...ah, what a long and exhaustive list, but just one item for now.

I can't help my son.

When he's hurt, I usually don't know where he's hurting or why or how it happened. I have to Sherlock Holmes my way through and hope for the best.

And when he wants or needs something he can't get or do for himself, which is just about everything, more than half the time I have no everloving idea what it is.

He tries to tell me these things, tries and tries and tries. The longer I don't know what to do or how to help, the more desperate he gets so that soon he just starts scrolling through his words, pulls out all he's got in there...milk, juice, downstairs, cookie, potty, socks, pizza, popcicle, bed (or bread, never sure), cheese, movie (or mommy, hard to tell, and if it's movie, which one, there are hundreds), jump, pretzel, open (and I go "open what?" to which he replies, pleadingly, "open what?").

And the real bitch of it is that maybe he doesn't want or need any of these things, he rejects them one by one as I try to make it right for him, to fix whatever's wrong, whateverthehell it is. He wants something, he needs something, something that only I can get for him, and if he just starts rattling off all the words he has maybe his idiot brain dead mother will finally hit on it, like the old story of the monkey left alone with the typewriter long enough to plunk out War and Peace.

Sometimes he drags me over to the couch, stands on it so we're the same height, and tries to make me lift him up and hold him like a baby, rock him back and forth, swing him around. He weighs seventy-two pounds, seventy-two very dense, very static pounds. Sometimes I oblige him, but once isn't enough and sooner or later I have to stop. This is met with great dissatisfaction. I try to explain that if I end up in the hospital in traction, then we'll really be screwed. He clearly believes I'm bluffing.

Sometimes it's like tonight, where he screams and cries and bellows and keens until I want to ram my head into a concrete block as hard as I can so I can't hear it anymore. Tonight Grace has just about had it too, stick a fork in her, she's done, so she's yelling on top of it, trying to yell over him. Oh the cacophony. I hear myself muttering things like "Jesus have mercy" and meaning it, lapsed Catholic or not, like the atheist in the foxhole that is suddenly more devout than the Pope.  I tell her that her screaming is making it worse but she doesn't care, she's been a good sport for as long as she could and enough already so could he just put a sock in it so she can watch Spongebob in peace.

I feel the anger, the scary kind, rising up like a giant wave, and I want to explode at the both of them, but mostly at him, to scream at him to shut the goddamn fuck up. Takes everything I have not to let it rip and shake the house. Every time I take the big breath in to let out my own earthshattering kaboom, I breathe out instead, as many times as I can.

Finally got to the point where I'd exhausted the amount of times I could breathe it out and the kaboom was coming, ready or not.  Everybody'd better hold on to something.

But then I looked into his face, which I suddenly realized I'd been avoiding.

Sadness. Not bratty tantrummy squalling. Just a deep ocean of sadness.

So that weird sound you heard a little while ago that you couldn't identify? That was mostly likely my heart cracking in half.

His mouth was doing that thing it does when he's trying so unbelievably hard to sort it out himself, to soldier through, to find an answer on his own, because clearly help's not coming. With eyes grown so huge and earthen and wet they could drown me like quicksand. No wonder I didn't want to look.

My child has worked harder in his almost seven years than most people do in a lifetime. Just to manage being here, in this world, with all its inescapable assaults and insults, its intolerable mayhem. One goddamn imposition after another, as my grandfather liked to say.

Guess what, though. We just got back from the bathroom. He took a crap the size of a groundhog,  And in this very moment, I have never seen a happier child. Dancing feet, laughing eyes, singing his wordless singsongy songs. Suddenly putting his face right up to mine, eye to eye, impish and elfin and free, smiling like the sun.

Oh my Cal.

If You Can Do Nothing Else...

People of the world, I have two words for you. Then I'll have a whole lot more, of course, because I do tend to go on.  But first just two, and here they are:

Be kind.

As I watch the media coverage (yes, I have power, don't hate me, I feel guilty enough I promise), I find myself walking around the house and muttering those two words, like a mantra, like a prayer.  Be kind.  Be kind.  Be kind.

I'm afraid of a lot of things. Not losing power on Monday meant I heard and saw, in real time, the things I was the most afraid of at that moment. Trees crushing people, a father in Rockland County, two little boys in Upper Westchester, right in their homes, gone in a second. A mother and her two babies in the rushing waters in Staten Island...I can't go on with that one, I don't need to, you've all heard it, we've all heard it and can't unhear it, can't unsee it through eyes open or closed.

So every time the house shook and groaned that night, I felt my body do that thing like a cat must do right before it pounces. Because it knew, my body that is, that it had to be ready to throw itself on top of those two small ones, those two little beings that own my heart...and it had to be ready to do it with or without my conscious participation.

As I said, I'm afraid of a lot of things.  But right now, the thing I'm most afraid of is people forgetting who they are. Forgetting that we are all made of exactly the same stuff, all on different roads that are all leading to exactly the same place, and that whether we've met or not, we're...

How to do this without being nauseously trite, cliche, churchy, Pollyana-ish, irritating. I don't want to annoy people, things are bad enough.  Let's try it this way:

One day, probably well more than a decade ago, I was having lunch with my parents at a McDonalds. I'm pretty sure it was the one in Mamaroneck, NY (much of which may still be underwater right now). I have no idea why we were doing this that day, it's not something we did much of once I'd grown up and moved out, we must have been at some event or something together and stopped for a bite.

A young couple with a baby sat at a nearby table. The baby was maybe a year or so, maybe a year and a half, old enough to eat some fries in her high chair, and one of those fries must have gone down the wrong way. Didn't seem like much at first, but after a few seconds of patting her back the baby's sounds started to change, and the mom and dad started looking like you never want to see any mom or dad look.

Before I knew what was happening, my mother, a registered nurse and unregistered supermom, had gotten out of her seat.  In what I remember as one swift, graceful movement, she took the baby from that other mother, held her with one arm so the baby's head was angled downward diagonally, thumped her tiny upper back between her shoulder blades while holding her that way, and then we finally heard what we were all begging God for, the outraged cries of one pissed-off baby.

At that, my mother handed the child back to the grateful parents, who were falling over themselves as they tearfully tried to express their thanks in their broken English.  And then it was over. Kind of.

I sat in that spot where I'd been frozen those few seconds it took for this world-shaking event to occur as I watched my mom come back to her seat. Then, for lack of anything else to do, and at a loss for words, we all started eating again. Silently. As if nothing had just happened. Kind of.

But as I sneaked looks at my mother between bites of my Quarter Pounder with Cheese, I saw her face do that thing--that thing when it's fighting itself not to cry, which to this day hurts my solar plexus like some giant brute just gave it a good sharp elbow. She and my dad were looking at each other, and I saw that his face was doing it too.  And then it hit me.  They were remembering.

They'd been here before. It was Zwieback toast instead of french fries. (BTW, don't give Zwieback toast to your babies, eat it yourself, it's great dunked in coffee.)

And instead of that stranger baby with the blocked windpipe, it was me.

Yep, I'm here today to babble endless stream-of-consciousness at you because of one simple fact: After trying everything you're supposed to try to save a choking baby, methods my mother could do in her sleep, my father finally did that last-resort thing you're not ever supposed to do because you risk lodging the blockage further. But my face was blue-black at this point, and it was time for the Hail Mary play.  He reached down my throat with his finger and scooped that chunk of baby-death-cookie right out of my windpipe.

I'll bet that back then, a thousand years or so before, I sounded just as pissed as that other baby.

But the point is this: At that moment in McDonalds, there was no "other" baby, was there?. What my mother did without even thinking was demonstrate what we ALL know in the deepest parts of us.

There are no "other" babies. There are no "others" period.

As we drive around right now, it's going to be easy to hate each other. Believe me, I get it. This one will try to cut you in line to get to the pump faster.  That other one will look at you funny.  Some other one will shoot her big mouth off because she's been idling in line for 4.37 hours and the driver in front of her just got the last drop of fuel available for miles. He's selfish, she's inconsiderate, he's texting and not paying attention, move up already, moron!!!!

And guess what else.  The news media will show you these moments.  Moments like this are nice and loud, they draw the camera's attention. They tell a story. We're all going to hell in a handbasket, sleep in your car or your gas'll get siphoned, folks are snapping left and right, punching each other out on Main Street, every man for himself, people suck. Not a pretty picture.

But is it the real picture? Because what about the moment where one guy notices the harried woman pulling her hair out in the minivan with the seven screaming kids, and he decides to let her in ahead of him in line?  You're never going to hear about that guy. But he's going to do it, and it's going to make her feel like she'll be able to make it through the day without ending up in a padded room drooling into a cup. And he's not the only guy who's going to do it, thousands will do this kind of thing. You won't hear about it. It's not loud.

Then there's that  woman who sees the ancient looking man with Jersey plates who doesn't have a clue about how to pump gas because it's against the law to do that in his state and the last time he did it he had hair. Where's the lever? What's with these buttons? Swipe what?  Instead of being outraged that he's making an interminable wait even more interminable, this woman will go up to him and gently help him cope. She'll show him how to run his card, what buttons to push. He'll be so relieved that he knows he'll never forget her.  PS, this will happen over and over again too. You won't see it on the news nearly as much as you'll see the angry mobs who think they're in a Mad Max movie. But KNOW this, friends. It is happening. More than the rage and flying fists. People are helping each other. Even if it's just that wry smile from one to another that says, "Man, this sucks."  Lives are saved because of acts this simple, acts that ripple and ripple beyond your wildest dreams.

Most people will remember who they are in these times.  Please be one with most people.

Be kind.

Not a Day Goes By

This year I understand better than ever why each year I watch and listen for all those hours, to all those names, to all those memories.

I was "lucky" enough not to lose anyone I knew eleven years ago today. No person I knew by name.

But in the past few years, the family I do know by name has had something of a tidal wave of loss.  I've shared a lot of it here.

My best friend's amazing mother, another mother to me, I told you about her.  http://everlovingmess.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-best-friends-mother.html

And there's my cousin Lily, a baby girl we lost when she was not quite ready to be born. And my cousin William, a baby boy, just ready to be born but didn't stay--both babies just as much our family as any I've been privileged to hold in my arms.

Just about one year ago it was my Uncle Dan and my cousin Kevin, a week apart from each other, I told you about them too.  http://everlovingmess.blogspot.com/2011/12/if-theres-top-ten-list-of-reasons-why-i_07.html

Then my Papa, our patriarch--equal parts wisdom, curmudgeon, and comic, all parts immeasurable love. You met him too in  http://everlovingmess.blogspot.com/2011/12/if-theres-top-ten-list-of-reasons-why-i_07.html.  That was just a little bit before we knew how close we were to losing him on top of it all.

And even my furry brother, Maxie boy--I still expect to hear his collar jingle when I go up the stairs at my mom and dad's, and sometimes I swear I do.

All these losses were hideous. Pretty much none of them a gentle fading into sleep after a long life of vibrant health. It was all shock and sickness and disbelief. All of them equally agonizing to bear for those of us still walking around here on the ground.

But here's the thing. I've been watching the ones closest to the ones who died, watching them very carefully, the ones the most run through by these losses, starting with my brilliant light of a mother, and on and on from there.  And the way they've carried on and loved and laughed and worked and played and shined light into the world...it's really boggled my brain. A miracle beyond the power of words to relate, although I try my best.

So it hit me as I watched and listened to all those "strangers" speaking from those microphones downtown this morning. They were doing it too. Through pain that should have buried them all, they are alive. And I don't mean "alive" as in just breathing in and out and sleepwalking through their days. I mean alive so brightly it cracks my heart open to see their faces and hear their words.

Strangers, my ass. Nobody's a stranger. One of these days that'll dawn on us all.  And it won't occur to anyone to make it his or her life's work to shower pain and anguish into the lives of others, because there will be no "others." And that'll mean the end of the need for any more remembrances like today's.

It's coming.

Don't believe the naysayers, they know nothing.

Just look for signs.

Scared Shoeless

The very long list of rules for being an autism parent grows by the second, but a few specific ones have smashed me over the head real hard lately. Rules like:

 - Don’t bother sitting down ever. Not worth it. It takes more energy to get up over and over and over again to save your child from the dangers of the household (or vice versa) than you can conserve by sitting at all.

 - Don’t close the bathroom door if you’re the only guardian in the house, and even with the door open, take heed of any appliances running that may interfere with hearing what’s going on in the home during the time you’re spending lounged out on the toilet (you self-centered bitch, you).

 - Don’t ever take off your shoes. And I mean not EVER.

 I’m beating around the bush a little here, I know. Because what I’m trying to tell you, well, I had to live through it, and revisiting it in my mind is a little uncomfortable. Uncomfortable as in it makes my heart thunder in my chest till you can see it jumping around in there and causes unpleasant fluids to rise up in the back of my throat. But we’ve been through so much together, and maybe it’ll be cathartic. Not funny, sorry to say. But worth going over if I can do it without hyperventilating.

 It was a beautiful summer afternoon, a few days ago, a Wednesday. Eight-year-old Grace had just left with her BFF and BFF’s mom to bowl a few frames at the local lanes. Six-year-old Calvin was tired and cranky from a long hot day at summer school and wanted nothing more than to chillax on the couch with his sippy cup. His eyes were heavy and I was hoping he wasn’t going to fall asleep there…so late in the afternoon for a nap, he’ll be up all night. But at least he was calm and quiet and settled. I was especially glad of this because I had to go to the bathroom…I mean really, really go...and when you’re alone in the house with your autistic child, lots of stars have to be in alignment for you to actually do whatcha gotta do. Checked and double-checked that the boy was dozy and drowsy and spacing out in front of the TV to the sights and sounds of Thomas the Tank Engine, then went to the loo to do my business.

 Now like I said, I know the rules. Don’t shut the door. And of course, I did not. Because if I lean way forward while I’m, um, you know, I can see and hear into the living room area and make sure no one’s acting up, breaking up housekeeping, building scaffolding to climb as high as possible, what have you. Yes, the dryer was running with its hypnotizing chuggagung chuggagung chuggagung. And yes, the article I was reading was interesting enough (although I could not tell you now what it was about). But even so, I would lean forward every minute or thereabouts, yep, everything’s ok. And probably after something like 6 to 10 minutes, all told, I came out of the bathroom.

 The first and only thing I saw was the wide-open front door.

 Which I had locked, and bolted when I sent Grace off to bowling. Hadn’t I?

 Next scene is a complete blur. Nothing but silence outside, silence except for my screaming. Head snapping back and forth to look up and down the ghost-town-empty street while I scream his name at the top of my lungs. Screaming his name, uselessly, because I know full well, despairing and desperate, that I can scream until my vocal chords are frayed and bloody. He does not come when he’s called, not if he’s off on a self-directed mission. He’s not going to come trotting over to me with a hangdog expression hoping not to be punished. No. Calvin doesn’t roll like that. Lots of autistic kids don’t roll like that. I might as well be in one of those dreams where you scream and no sound comes out. But there are times when you know it’s not a dream.

 My next-door neighbor, Maria, mother of two boys now grown young men, hears me and figures out immediately what’s wrong. I hear her yell that she’s grabbing her shoes so she can get into her car and start driving around.

Shoes on. Shoes. Why the hell do I not have shoes on. Where are my shoes, what are shoes. Archangel Michael, Jesus, Mary, get on this NOW, I’m not fucking around. Trace, get the phone before anymore thoughts or prayers, before anymore seconds, before shoes.

I call 911, from the land line so they’ll know where I am, still shouting his name from the front yard until the 911 answers, then telling 911 the necessary things—somehow I could still speak English and they understood me, miraculous. Still on the phone I see teenage girls pouring out of Maria’s house, friends of her sons, and I scream at them, “Help me! Find my son, he’s six, he can’t talk, he’s wearing orange shorts! Please!!!!” They start nodding, running in all directions to find the little boy in orange shorts who can’t talk. 

I’m STILL 911-ing, answering more questions, and I hear Maria yell to me, “Tracy, Stephen’s at the pool, he says he can see a little boy in the gazebo!!!”

Stephen. Stephen is her son, he works at the pool in our housing complex, he can see the gazebo in the distance, the gazebo in the playground. The playground. The swings. That has to be right. How could I not have thought of that. Because I was thinking about the cars and their moronic drivers who circle the neighborhood like it’s the Indy 500. And the stupid-ass stream down the steep bank behind the house. And last but not least, that murderous sexual predator that network television says is in all our neighborhoods.

 So this is where I apologize to 911 that my cordless home phone will be blinking out as I sprint away from the house, across and down the street, hit the open field of the playground grounds, see the gazebo coming into sight as I round the slight bend.

 Orange shorts.

 Navy shirt.

 No shoes.

 I get to him and take hold of him. He immediately starts complaining, not at all happy to be pulled away from his happy place. Can’t blame him for that, when he made that front door swing open he must have felt like he’d just won the lottery. He probably dashed across the street (the street, the goddamned fucking street with all those assholes in all those cars), hurtling himself toward that promised land of swings like his hair was on fire. I’d been a full twelve feet away the moment of his escape and none the wiser. He had to have perfectly timed it between my minute-to-minute lean-forward-and-looks. Autistic ninja child.

 He grudgingly allowed me to start walking him back home, and that’s when I noticed that I was wailing. Half bent over, holding my stomach with the hand that didn’t have Calvin, convulsing and heaving like a crazed asylum-dweller. I wondered when that had started. I think it was right after I got my first glimpse of orange.

I noticed Maria coming toward me through the playground. She wrapped her arm around me and walked us back home, spoke calming words into my ear, “He’s okay…you found him…it’s alright…Calvin, you scared Mommy!” There was a part of me standing outside myself observing this whole thing that was a little embarrassed by the melodrama. It said, great, now Maria knows you're a hysterical nutcase.

 I wish I could tell you how long this ordeal lasted. I now know exactly what it feels like to lose all sense of time.

I’ve read the articles, watched the TV coverage, you probably have too--with the desperate parents, their autistic child had wandered away, slipped the house and property somehow, the community now covering the streets, police dogs trying to pick up scents, helicopters scanning from above. I’ve gotten calls in the past from my mom after she’s heard about a missing child in my neck of the woods, a boy, autistic...she'd call me so she could hear my voice say "It's not Cal."

 My story from Wednesday won’t be on the six or eleven o’clock news. I found my boy before we needed any helicopters or bloodhounds. But for some untold number of minutes that I thought were never going to end, I didn’t know if my story was going to be the next story, if my mother was going to call and I was going to have to tell her what she'd called not to hear. For that terrifying moment I got a glimpse of what they’ve all gone through. And it’s inexplicably, horribly, unfathomably bad.

 For comfort and courage I keep in the front of my mind that the Archangel Michael and I have a deal.  (Maybe you don’t believe in angels? That they can work extra hard for you when you remember to call on them right from your guts, especially when the shit hits the fan? Trust me, I’d be toast otherwise.) Seems to me he’s holding up his end of the bargain. So all I need is the strength to hold up mine.

 Scariest job I’ve ever loved, people. Really really really.

 (P.S. Got through it without shoes, but I don’t recommend it.)