Regarding Avonte

We're used to "If you see something, say something" as a way and means to keep ourselves from getting blown up by the bad guys.

Fine advice, but it's time for the world to learn how to use that same set of directions in more ways than just that one.

The world has to wake up to something it may not want to see, something it may be afraid to see, and that something is:

Our world is teeming with Avonte Oquendos.

You don't need me to spew the statistics, look them up if you haven't heard. And here comes the hard part, that part that we really don't want to think about:

The Avonte Oquendos can't go it alone. There's no luxury of "the world is my oyster...I am a rock, I am an island...hurray for rugged independence...manifest destiny...she's leaving home, bye bye" for these people. They need us to protect them, to surround them with our care, because we are quite literally all they have.

Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Because I'm not just talking about just those of us who are "in the know," those of us who rolled the dice, had our babies, and landed one or more times on the space marked "Autism." Because if you aren't that parent, you're that grandparent, that uncle or aunt or cousin, that coworker, that boss, that employee, that best friend, that sister, that brother. No one is left out. If you care about anybody, you care about this. It's a logical fact. It's the law of probability. The numbers are growing and growing and growing at a rate that you could almost call ludicrous if there was anything funny about it.

So if you see something, say something.

"See what?" you might ask. So many signs to consider. Again, take a minute, Candy Crush will still be there, a quick Google search will tell you plenty. Maybe it's a boy or a girl, anywhere from tiny to way taller than you, in his or her own little world, flapping hands, spinning a string, flicking a pencil, making funny noises that sound like crowing or barking or meowing, maybe spouting rhymes or lines from movies to no one in particular, spinning a wheel on a toy alone on a sidewalk, rocking back and forth rhythmically, or spinning in circles, looking like no one is minding him, or minding her. If that person is in any stage of undress, there's another good sign. If he or she doesn't seem at all responsive when spoken to, that could also be a clue. That's not all I can tell you, but it's a start.

He or she could could be any race, color, or creed, and any age. He or she is likely to be exceedingly beautiful...although I may be saying that because over the past five or so years I haven't seen or met one autistic person that I haven't found to be exceedingly beautiful.

Maybe you're not seeing exactly what I described, but you just have a feeling....something is off...it nags at you that this looks like a person that shouldn't be on his own, or on her own, without a caregiver. That's enough to maybe observe a little more and follow your gut.

If you're nervous about approaching the person, if you're not comfortable, if he or she is bigger than you and you worry you could be hurt, fair enough. Most of us have phones, just call 911, mention what you're seeing and that you wonder if the person might need help, that from what you've learned about autism, you think this person might be affected, could someone come and check it out.

If you're wrong, no harm, no foul, nothing to be sheepish about because, guess what, you've still done the world a service...because if you feel the need to act on something like this, maybe people you know will start thinking along those lines too, you don't know what your sphere of influence is, you don't know how far you ripple out.

If you're right, you've saved a life and brought joy back to people who were in danger of losing a piece of theirs forever.

Maybe you're like me and you can't stop thinking of this boy from the news, seeing his face in your mind, his family's faces, the brother we've seen organizing searches, the mother whose face I wish I could stop seeing, but I can't.

If you believe in angels, in big, powerful kickass angels, like Michael the Archangel, think about him shielding Avonte, protecting him. Can't hurt, might help, what do we know? "More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Shakespeare says, and honestly, he's terribly smart about things. And also, just for the record, we're all Horatio. So just for good measure, call in anyone you can think of, anyone you're used to talking to, and whatever or whoever you call it. It doesn't care what you call it.

God...Jesus...Jeshua...Yeshua...Moses...Kwan Yin...The Blessed Mother...The Prophet Mohammed....the Buddha...God the Father...Krishna...The Magdalene...The Divine Creator...Your Powerful, Powerful Grandmother in the spirit realm...the Soul of Mother Theresa....John Paul II...Saint Anthony (if he can help find things why not people)....Saint Francis...Saint Jude...the Legions of Angels...the Elementals...the Greatest Good and Highest Joy of All Concerned...All That Is...the Light...the Dude...the Holy Spirit...Love Actually.

I think we've pretty much all been lost. We've all needed to bring in the "big guns." We've all been pulled out of the abyss by something we couldn't exactly see or hear or smell or taste, whether we want to believe or admit it or not.

I told you a story over a year ago called "Scared Shoeless" (http://everlovingmess.blogspot.com/2012/07/scared-shoeless_13.html) It's the story of how for just around a quarter hour of my life I was like Avonte Oquendo's mother. If I could find the absolute worst person on the planet, I don't think I could bring myself to wish on him or her what that moment in time was like for me.

While I may have gone through a nasty bout of premature aging during those fifteen minutes or so, "Scared Shoeless" had a happy ending on that quiet summer day. But having been through just that tiny, minuscule fraction of what Avonte's family has been enduring for weeks upon weeks, my heart can't really sleep well. I wake up every day and hope to hear the news his family prays for with all they've got.

I don't know what has happened to this boy. But somebody has to know.

The thing is, Avonte Oquendo can't talk for himself. We have to keep talking for him. Please keep talking. To yourselves and each other and to anything seen or unseen that you believe in. It can do no harm, and it could change the world.

Please please please. And thank you.

Mad Elephant

It's a precarious place I'm in right now. All of Calvin's favorite "moobies" are in a red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites." We had to start storing them that way because the boy's become so obsessed with our DVD collection that if he gets his hands on one, he pulls it from the case and uses it like a frisbee, or spins it on his forefinger, or gets it stuck on his forefinger (found this out once when his regular noises turned into the type of scream usually reserved for the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise). So if we want to have any DVDs left that are not scratched beyond any hope of ever playing again, we had to come up with a system. (P.S. Geeks, I love you, but now would not be the time to tell me that the DVD is obsolete technology and why don't I digitize, because I'm in a kind of mood to tell you exactly what you can digitize...)

Anyway, I mentioned the red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites." It's gone missing. I'll give you a moment to gasp theatrically. This is the time of night where if my son doesn't settle down and go to sleep I might have to tear my own face off just a little bit. And tonight he does not want to settle down and go to sleep without his "moobie."

I've been walking around the house in circles like I've just slipped my straitjacket, muttering things like, "How the fuck can this happen, how the fuck can this happen, how the fuck can this happen." I don't know why I mutter in such a manner, because I know exactly how the fuck this happened. The last time I handled the red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites," it was four o'clock this morning, and I had been up since one-thirty, because that was the time my beloved son sprang from his bed and began behaving like a squirrel who'd just polished off a case of Red Bull. So by four a.m. the only thing I could think of to do was to hand him the red DVD wallet labeled "Portable Favorites" and let him pick his poison and pray that it settle him down.

He'd picked Dumbo. I fucking hate Dumbo. You probably remember Dumbo as an adorable baby elephant with ears that were so freakishly large that the surrounding cruel world bullied and rebuffed him mercilessly. And you probably grieved with him when they ripped him from his mother because she'd gone a little ballistic defending him and got herself locked her up for being a "mad elephant." Yeah, I used to feel that way too. I felt bad for Dumbo and his poor locked-up mother. Now I hate the little bastard, hate him. Irrationally. Eight hundred fifty-two thousand viewings of an animated Disney film, usually somewhere between 1 and 4 a.m., will do that to you. And all I can think of when I consider Mrs. Jumbo's incarceration is how quiet and peaceful it must be in there so she should stop complaining, ask the Ringmaster for a copy of Fifty Shakes of Gray, and enjoy some time off.

I sat down to write to you all in order to distract myself from going truly insane. I think it's working. And I may have overreacted a little bit about Dumbo. I was just a little cranky. I don't hate him, he's very cute and sweet and I'm very empathetic and when Mrs. Jumbo rocks him tenderly in her trunk through her prison bars to the tune of "Baby Mine, Don't You Cry," I usually have to go hide in the bathroom and sob into a towel.

Plus, look at what's happened in the meantime.

And all is right with the world.

Now excuse me while I rip the house apart and find those goddamn "moobies," or we'll end up meeting back here tomorrow and I'll probably have a few choice words to say about Curious Friggin George.