Monthly Archives: December 2020

December 31, 2020 At the beginning of the year, I said: we’re going green. Drop a car and add trees and solar panels. For realz. It’s so easy to hit a certain status quo of treading water and not actually do the things you really, really want to do. In January 2020 I said: not this year. We’re doing it!!! Well, we did it. And it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I hate to admit […]

For this Christmas 2020, I’m looking back at the photos we tried to take for the card for Christmas 2019. Dar does not understand cameras. Dar does not linger over photos of himself or anyone else. Asking Dar to smile for cameras is mostly frustrating. I tickle him to try to get him to smile; just as often, it has the opposite effect. If forced to choose between a photo of my best smile and his, it’s no contest: I […]

I used to wonder: if an animal looks like it is smiling, is it smiling? Is it happy? Eventually I was convinced: yes. We can never get Dar to smile for photos. Maybe there’s a sort of unvarnished honesty to that. If he’s smiling, is he happy? Usually, yeah. But he usually doesn’t like having his photo taken. You ever hear of someone offended at being told “smile”? Yeah, Dar is way ahead of the curve on that one. I’m […]

December 8, 2020 Forty years ago today, John Lennon was assassinated. In two short months, John Lennon will have been slain dead longer than he was alive. Fifteen years ago, at my mother’s funeral service, all 100 of us sang “Imagine,” despite the opening line. I know Mom would have wanted that. She was always the only person I knew to blame Paul for breaking up the Beatles. Ten years ago, for my wedding ceremony’s only song, I asked my […]

During this pandemic, Dar’s weekdaily three-hour sessions with his ABA therapist have been crucial to his education. But they’ve also been crucial to our sanity, a heavenly three hours a day when someone is being paid to take care of Dar. Uh, anyone notice that so far I’ve been writing this in the past perfect? Lately, Dar has been MELTING DOWN during every session. That only starts with screaming like he’s in labor. It also includes throwing things like silverware […]