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Monday, December 11, 2006

Making the grade

When Jamie entered kindergarten nine years ago, my wife Janet and I worried that he wouldn’t be ready.  Our concerns were not unusual—but Jamie was: he would be the only child with Down syndrome in Westview Elementary.  He was assigned a paraprofessional and “pullout” sessions for occupational and speech therapy: standard fare, these days, for “special needs” children of all kinds.  But at the age of six, Jamie wasn’t very verbal, and we had no idea how he’d adjust to a real classroom after four years of child care.

Imagine our relief, then, when we went to our first parent-teacher conference in October and were informed that Jamie was “advanced” academically but needed some work with his social skills.  He knew the alphabet and lots of fun facts about animals; he had shown off his amazing memory.  How, we were asked, had he managed to learn so much?

Last fall, our first meeting with Jamie’s seventh-grade teachers was not nearly so cheering.  Despite his math skills—he can do two-digit multiplication with ease—he was failing to grasp the concepts of area and perimeter.  He wasn’t paying attention in science class, where his paraprofessional was doing much of his work for him; and he didn’t seem to get French at all.

We’d asked for Jamie to be included in those three “regular” classrooms, on the grounds that he’s good at math, fascinated with the natural world, and exceptionally curious about languages.  But when we discovered that the next item on the math agenda would be the area of irregular shapes, we agreed to bail out.

We pleaded for French and science, though.  “I know he’s not getting it all,” Janet said to his science teacher.  “But he truly loves learning about the world around him, and we don’t want that world to close in on him . . .  just yet.” His French teacher, unsurprisingly, had never had a child with Down syndrome in her class; she assured us that Jamie did not speak when he was called on and did not understand how to write complete sentences in French.  “He doesn’t write complete sentences in English, either,” I replied.  “And he’s shy about speaking up.  But he already knows the days of the week and the months of the year, and he’s beginning to understand about time.  Now, we don’t want him to slow down the rest of the class.  So if it’s possible for him to take the class pass/fail, we’ll do everything we can to help him.”

I turned out to be wrong about time: Jamie never did understand why the French perversely insist on calling 7:40 eight hours minus twenty, so I eventually agreed with him that sept heures et quarante would get the general idea across even if it was marked “wrong” on the test.  And even though he learned what voyager means, he never remembered that tu voyages has an “s” even though je voyage and il voyage do not.  But he negotiated the hyphens and apostrophes of qu’est-ce que c’est with élan, he mastered the form of est-ce que tu? and he turned out to be a whiz with adverbs—getting them right quelquefois at first, then souvent.  (Though quelquefois remains his favorite.) His pronunciation got better and better, too—no small thing for a child who didn’t learn to read fluently until he was eight.  It was hard enough for him to master English vowels and silent letters the first time around, let alone foreign imponderables like ils aiment and les yeux.

One day when we were walking Lucy, our dog, I told him how proud I was of all his hard work in French.  He was in no mood for kind words: “it’s too hard,” he grumbled.  “I always fail.” He’d said something similar about science as well, when he had trouble keeping track of all the parts of a cell and began to realize that he might not achieve his dream of becoming a marine biologist.  (I told him he could still shoot for the position of marine biologist helper.) Jamie is fifteen years old; he knows he has a disability, he knows that it’s called “Down syndrome,” and he’s very well aware of how hard he struggles just to stay in the same room with “normal” kids a few years younger than he.  He even had an odd moment of illumination in January of this year when the science class turned to the details of human reproduction, and he learned that most of us have 46 chromosomes but that people with Down syndrome have 47.  “Wow, one more,” he said, intrigued and a little bit impressed.  I wonder if he thought to himself, you know, that explains a lot, and whether this was any comfort to him in those rare moments when he thinks of himself as someone who always fails.

But despite his moments of despair, he never failed to remember that étudier and décembre take accents aigus and that mère and père take accents graves.  When we asked him, parle-tu français? he never failed to say je parle français souvent or très bien—even though those answers are not quite true.  And although he failed his science test on rocks, he learned a great deal about living things—which is where his real interests lie, anyway.  When, in response to his query about why one of his Challenger League baseball teammates was bald, I tried to explain to him what cancer is, and how cells could be sick, he replied, “like the cell membrane and the cell nucleus.” When we went through the digestive system on one long homework night, I said “let’s skip the pancreas—I don’t think you know that one,” and he shot back, “Lucy had pancreatitis and cannot eat any spicy food.”

At the end of the year, Jamie’s teachers and caseworkers advised us that eighth-grade science and French would definitely be too much for him.  Perhaps they feared that Jamie’s parents, the double-barreled Ph.D.s, would push their disabled kid until he broke.  “That’s fine with us,” we said, to their palpable relief.  “We just wanted him to get a sense of it all, and to stay in some regular classes for as long as he could.” From this point on, we figure, we’ll hire tutors for him, and they can teach him at his own pace. 

It’s true, he failed quelquefois.  But in eight years of inclusive education, he learned more about the world than we—or, possibly, he—could have hoped for when he started kindergarten.  Now, as Jamie finally leaves the “regular” classroom, all we can hope is that he taught his teachers and classmates a few valuable things about people with 47 chromosomes.  And that they’ll remember the lesson, too.

Posted by Michael on 12/11 at 08:35 AM
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Tough guy

A little over three weeks ago, on October 8, I was playing a particularly intense game of hockey.  The Capitals were locked in a 0-0 tie with their rivals, the Flatliners, whom they’d tied 4-4 on the opening day of the season.  I’d missed that opening game, but had played the next three, and I was off to a blistering start: nine goals, four assists (and three wins—that’s the important stat, of course, since there’s no “I” in “Capitals”).  Not bad for a 45-year-old man.  After a hat trick in a 6-0 win, one of my twenty-something teammates asked, “what’s with the youth elixir?” “Blood of virgins, my boy,” I replied.  “You can’t beat it with that Red Bull shit of yours.”

And though I didn’t light the lamp against the Flatliners, I helped break the game open in little ways.  There were about twelve minutes left when I backchecked against one of the Flatliners’ faster players, staying between him and the puck deep in our zone and giving our defenseman a little room to start up ice.  This infuriated the guy for some reason, so he squeezed past me and took a run at the defenseman; for this he got two minutes for charging, and as he stormed off the ice indignantly, whined to the ref that he was only retaliating for “interference” from me (a charge of which, I assure you, I was completely innocent).  Then, on the ensuing power play, I took the puck into the Flatliners’ zone wide on the left side and was pursued by another of their better players—who, finding it impossible to strip me of the puck as I came in on net, took my feet out from under me.  Tweet!  Just like that, the Flatliners had two guys in the box, and we had a rare (for our league) five-on-three.  We scored on a scramble in front of the net thirty seconds later; I assisted on the goal.  On my next shift, I sprung my center on a breakaway with a crisp pass off a faceoff, and he converted.  We added a very late goal to make it 3-0.

But when I was taken down on that power-play rush, I hit my head hard.  It was still ringing slightly after the game, so when I got home I took some ibuprofen.  Still, it was a minor injury at most, and hey—I simply took one for the team, because there’s no “I” in “power play.”

The next morning, though, I noticed a very strange thing: my head was fine, but my right hip was all screwy.  I could walk and run OK, but I had no lateral motion with my right leg—or, rather, I had very limited lateral motion with pain.  You know the “getting into car” motion?  Right, well, I couldn’t do that.  I thought that maybe it was a hip pointer or something, but it didn’t seem severe enough for a doctor’s visit.  I decided I would simply take it easy and avoid that week’s Tuesday Night Old Guys’ Game.

And now here comes the critical pivot of the story.

When last we saw Jamie on this blog, he was jumping off diving boards.  But what I didn’t tell you was that since the beginning of the fall semester he’s also ventured into two more new sports:  he’s played three rounds of golf with me, smackin’ the ball with aplomb every tenth or eleventh swing (unlike every other golfer on the planet, he does not get frustrated); more important, he’s started his first karate class.  It’s a Wednesday night Tang Soo Do at the local Y, and it’s something he’s wanted to do for many years, not least because his big brother has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and Jamie has long been fascinated with Nick’s martial-arts prowess.  But as I watched the first class from the sidelines, I thought Jamie seemed kind of lost, and though his instructor was gentle and kind with him, I could tell that when the class broke up into smaller groups, his attention wandered.  So I did the sensible thing: next time around, I signed up for the class and took my place next to him at the back of the class with the neophyte white belts.

The first two classes went well.  Jamie approached the kicks and the forms with the same dedication he’d been giving to his golf game, practicing again and again with great patience.  At the end of our second class he’d learned form one, which involves all kinds of low blocks, spins, straight punches, and forward kicks; form two involves the same motions but with high blocks, high punches, and side kicks.  The class starts off with 75 jumping jacks and lots of calisthenics, some of which Jamie can do, some of which he can’t.  But his spirit, as they say in the business, is indomitable.  “If we keep working hard,” I told him after the second class, “we can take the test to become orange belts.”

“Michael,” he replied dismissively, “I’m gonna be a black belt.”

“Wow!” I said.  “OK, that’ll take a lot of work, and a couple of years.  It took Nick five or six years, you know.” He nodded.

But after my little hip injury, I wasn’t sure I was up for 90 minutes of kicking and flailing up and down a basketball court, and I told Jamie I might have to skip the class.  “You will not have to skip the class!” he insisted.  “You can do it!”

How could I refuse?  I promised him I would do my best.

And so it happened that I was making my way downcourt at 8:30 pm three weeks ago today, doing the weakest little side kicks you ever did see, with my tender right leg lifting my foot only about eight inches off the floor.  Then we were told to do back kicks, which Jamie and I hadn’t really learned yet; for these we would have to take a half-step back, pivot, and kick with our heel to the ceiling and our back to our “opponent.” I winced audibly on the first few, and then, to my right, I heard a crash.  Jamie had wiped out.

At first I thought he’d simply spun a bit too much on the pivot and lost his balance.  But he was splayed on the court with his right leg fully extended, and he said, in an oddly broken voice, “my knee.”

The knee in question was very ugly: the patella had somehow slid off to the right side of the leg, and the little hollow left in its place was getting purple fast.  He had dislocated his knee.  Badly.

I immediately did something I would never have done if I’d had time to think: I rushed to his side, held his leg carefully, and popped the patella back into place.  Because I remembered that Jamie’s mother, the elusive and mysterious and scarily double-jointed Janet Lyon, had dislocated her knee twenty years earlier.  Of course, she’d done it while doing the limbo, and of course, she’d done it while doing the limbo when the bar was about eighteen inches off the floor, because she is really, really scarily double-jointed.  But still.  Jamie’s leg looked terrible; it looked like Janet’s leg; Janet had dislocated her knee at a party thrown by her fellow nurses; one of the nurses had popped her patella back into place and placed a bag of ice on it; so without further ado, I popped Jamie’s patella back into place. 

The class came to a halt, of course, while I was doing this, and the instructor helped me walk Jamie gingerly over to the stands, making sure he didn’t place any weight on his right leg.  Someone else got a bag of ice from the Y bag-of-ice stash.  I told Jamie we were done for the night and were going home, perhaps going to the hospital . . . and he was more upset about this than about anything else.

Because, you know, my Jamie does not cry.  He does not scream.  When he is in great pain—say, when his kneecap suddenly slides from the front of his leg to the side—he speaks in a strange little voice and he says, “my knee—I broke my knee.” That is all.  Then he gets angry.  Whether at the pain or at the fuss or at his father telling him he was done for the night, I do not know.  But I told him his knee was not, in fact, broken.  It had just been—a new word—dislocated.  In the wrong place.

The instructor and I took him to the locker room and got his things together.  I let the instructor know that Jamie’s mother is a former R.N. and would take over with him the minute I got him home, but that for now there was no reason to call an ambulance.  And that as far as future classes went, we would just play it by ear.  (He called over the next weekend to check in on Jamie.  That was very kind, I thought.)

When I got Jamie home a few minutes later, Janet was first surprised at our early arrival and then horrified, not least because she remembered very well how much her own dislocation had hurt.  We sat Jamie down on the couch and made him comfortable and watched some TV while keeping his leg up and iced.  Janet told me that she’d recently seen Jamie popping his knee out slightly: apparently he could do it at will, and she’d warned him that it was a dangerous thing to do and he shouldn’t be doing it.  But, she added, the sight had filled her with dread, because Jamie’s loose-jointedness was precisely like her own loose-jointedness, and she’d begun to worry that it might cause problems for him down the road.  And here we were, already down that road.

Jamie, meanwhile, was feeling much better.  He was still a little tentative, and seemed a little worried that his knee could really go that far out of joint, but he wasn’t in any pain at all.  Janet turned to me and gave me the highest praise in her lexicon: you did exactly the right thing. Yes, well.  It has occurred to me often in the past three weeks that if I’d somehow made things worse by trying to replace the patella on the spot, I could have given Jamie a very serious injury.  It is, perhaps, a good thing that I was not entirely sure what I was doing.

Jamie is just fine now, though he’s (understandably) a bit more protective about the knee. We ask him how it is, and he says it’s OK, and he is not impatient with our asking him, day after day.  Amazingly, he didn’t miss his Tang Soo Do classes on October 18 or 25, and he’s going again tonight, whereas I missed last week (too busy) and will miss this one (traveling).  Janet wrapped him up in a knee brace and Ace bandage two weeks ago, and just the brace last week.  We spoke to the instructor and we’re all on the same page: for now, no jumping jacks, no hyperextensions, and very gentle side and back kicks.  More or less the kind of E-Z kicking I’d been doing when Jamie went down.  But the funny thing is that while it took me a week and a half to recover from my wussy little hip injury (and of course I haven’t played my weekend games since October 14, because of all this traveling about), Jamie hasn’t missed a step.  Because, you know, he’s really one tough guy.

Posted by Michael on 11/01 at 04:34 PM
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Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Now boarding

As Elvis Costello says, “It creeps up on you without a warning, 45.” But that’s not really true.  I’ve known for a long time that I would turn 45 today.  And Janet got me my very own iPod, which, I believe, I can use to download eight-track tapes onto the U-tubes underneath the Internets!  At last—now I can finally show everyone how Three Dog Night expanded the frontiers of rock and paved the way for punk and No Wave!

But never mind about me today—let’s talk about Jamie.

The story of how Jamie learned to swim is a loooong story.  But we’ll tell the short version today, because we have a bunch of other things to do.  He started out as a little aquatic mammal who would jump into practically any body of water from the bathtub to the Arctic, but at some point during the summer of 1998, he must’ve had a Terrible Experience at summer day camp, because for the next year or two I could barely get him to go in the pool with me.  When he was eight and nine, his “swimming” experiences consisted of hanging onto my shoulder like a Rhesus monkey in water three feet deep.  It was very discouraging.  Before his Terrible Experience (the nature of which we never learned), he’d loved to play all kinds of fun games in the pool, like “he’s my guy,” which involved me singing, “he’s my guy and my guy and my guy and my guy and his name is Jamie B.,” tossing him up and down on each “my guy” and then hurling him backwards over my head and into about four or five feet of water on “B.” But during the dark years, there were no fun games.  Just a single unvarying exercise of “I clutch daddy.”

When we moved to central Pennsylvania I set about fixing this.  By the end of our first summer here, in 2001, I had gotten Jamie to the point at which he was willing to play by himself in shallow water—and just before the outdoor pool closed for the year, I persuaded him to hold onto me in the deep end for a few seconds.  He let go for a moment, tried to touch bottom, and cried, “is deep!  I would sink!” I assured him that he would not sink, he would float, but that we didn’t have to stay in the deep end any longer.  Over that winter, I joined a gym with an indoor pool, and since they allowed people to wear flotation devices in this pool, I fastened a flotation belt onto Jamie and let him get his confidence back bit by bit.

It took two years, but by the time he was twelve he was willing, once again, to jump into practically any body of water, no matter how deep.  Gradually, I weaned him from the flotation belt.  Sometimes the gradual process wasn’t gradual at all: once in early 2003, he was so taken with his newfound skills that he simply jumped right into the deep end by himself.  He immediately realized he was in way over his head, as the saying goes, and he paddled frantically back to the edge of the pool.  But it was a start.  That summer, he considered going off the diving board at Penn State’s outdoor pool, and actually considered it for about two full minutes while standing at the edge of the diving board (you can picture the scene, I’m sure)—before shuffling carefully back to dry land, jumping off the side of the deep end, and swimming half the length of the pool (a good 25 meters) before hauling himself out and announcing, “I am a brave and very good kid.” Which he was.  He was simply frightened of the board’s bounciness, because he likes to have a nice steady surface under his feet.

Since then he’s been an aquatic mammal again, and even he’s developed an idiosyncratic swimming stroke that serves him well.  His arms rarely break the plane of the water; instead, he thrusts them under his chest while frog-kicking.  It’s like watching a human try to imitate a sea lion, as I’ve told him many times.  (His response is usually to rotate and flip in the water like a sea lion.  He’s good at it.) He can move surprisingly fast this way, however ungainly it looks.  He can also stay afloat with ease, so he never worries any more about whether the water is deep.  And as he’s grown taller, he’s grown out of the shallow ends of the pools, to which he used to confine himself in his more timorous days.

All this would be quite satisfying enough, but over the past couple of weekends he’s had a couple more breakthroughs.  Now that September is here, Penn State’s outdoor pool is closed, and we’ve gone to the indoor pools of the Natatorium.  Five years ago he found these too intimidating: one is a 14-foot-deep diving pool, one is a six-to-ten-foot deep lap pool, and one is a three-to-five-foot deep lap pool.  In 2001-02 he could only manage the shallow end of the last of these.  Two weeks ago, by contrast, he jumped right into what I called (sneakily) the “big kids’ pool,” and proceeded—with minimal, but crucial, urging—to swim four laps back and forth.  We punctuated these with experiments in How to Touch the Bottom at both ends, and Jamie was thrilled to discover that when you’re five foot two, six feet of water isn’t very intimidating at all.

And then this Sunday we were playing around the sides of the diving pool alongside six or seven students.  I asked Jamie, for the hundredth time, if he wanted to go off the diving board, and for the hundredth time, he replied, “I don’t think so.” As I have on the previous 99 occasions, I said, “OK, then, just checking.” But this time I added, pointing to five lithe and rambunctious young men who were taking turns flying off the board, “you know, they’re not much older than you are, those guys.  They’re maybe 19 or 20, I think.” And that did it!  Before I knew what was up, Jamie was striding over to the board, muttering, “I will do it by myself.” I asked the lifeguard whether Jamie would be allowed to wear his goggles (the outdoor pools in State College forbid this), and he said, “sure—he’ll probably lose ‘em when he hits the water, but that’s OK if you can get ‘em.” And then splash! Without the slightest hesitation, Jamie had walked right to the end of the bouncy board and flung himself off.  He swam to the ladder, goggles still snugly on his face, where I met him with “nice jump!” and a big high five, and he—you knew this was coming, right?—announced that he would do it again.  And then again.  And then again. . . .

Welcome to the wonderful world of diving boards, Jamie.  We’re glad to have you.  It’s been well worth the wait.

Posted by Michael on 09/26 at 07:46 AM
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Thursday, August 24, 2006

Jamie’s trip to Syracuse, part two

So here’s what happened when Jamie and I sat down with Rosemary and her computer keyboard.  First we etched a pentangle into the ground, then we set it on fire. . . .

No, not really!  I am only kidding about the pentangle.  And the fire.  But Jamie and I did sit down.

After we’d done introductions and talked a bit about sharks and Australia and other things that Jamie’s familiar with, Rosemary showed Jamie how the word-recognition software works.  Once he typed a letter, the screen offered him six likely choices; if his word was among them, he would press the number for the word, and if it wasn’t, he would go on and type the next letter until his word appeared.  And so on.  It took him a few minutes to get the hang of this.  The software was the magic kind that can talk, so each time Jamie completed a word, he was able to hear it spoken by the computer.

And then things got interesting.

Rosemary showed Jamie a picture and asked him to tell a story about it.  “Oboy,” I thought to myself.  “This is precisely what Jamie can’t do.” Now, as exceptionally dedicated readers of this blog may know, I have misunderestimated Jamie before, so I try to be cautious before I think thoughts like “this is something he can’t do.” But I do know that narrative is something about which he has often expressed disappointment and frustration.  He lives with people who tell stories fluently, one of whom often tells stories about him, and he knows he doesn’t have that kind of fluency.  Accordingly, when you ask him to tell about X or Y, he will turn to Nick or to Janet or to me and say, “you tell.” Obviously, this strategy doesn’t work when he’s being asked about experiences only he knows about, and I’ve spoken to him about the Other Minds Problem, just to see if he understands that other people don’t know the things he knows and don’t have the memories he has.  (More specifically: I’ve asked him the classic Other Minds Problem question of what would happen if you showed someone a rabbit under a hat, then asked them to leave the room, then switched the rabbit for a mouse, then asked them to come back in.  Would they believe that a rabbit was under the hat, or a mouse?  At first Jamie said “mouse,” so I repeated the question more carefully and explained that the person who left the room knows nothing about the switch, whereupon he said “rabbit.” Results: inconclusive!) “And that’s why we’d love to hear your stories,” I always say.  “Because we’d love to hear what you think about everything.”

The picture showed a kangaroo, a joey, and a man on a horse.  Jamie began to type.  Rosemary guided his right elbow; this is one of the things that makes FC controversial, because it introduces the ouija-board question.  But from what I could see, she wasn’t leading him to pick one letter or another.  She did alert him to when selections of words became available on the screen, and she made sure that his elbow was level with his forearm and that his index finger was straight.  In other words, she was facilitating.  But she wasn’t pushing his arm all over the keyboard.

Jamie, with Rosemary’s help, wrote:

The horse is driving a Joey away from its mother.

“Hmmmm,” I hmmmed.  The sentence was plausible enough, but I questioned the word “driving.” I’d never heard Jamie use the word before, and yet I knew it wasn’t out of his reach.

“Very good, Jamie,” Rosemary said, and I thought they’d move on to another picture.  Instead, Rosemary proceeded to ask Jamie why the horse was driving the joey away from its mother.  Back to the keyboard:

The horse is driving a Joey away from its mother the man wanted the Joey for a pet.

Well, surely you recall that passage from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel:  “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story,” Forster writes.  “‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” So Jamie had already progressed to plot, leaving out the “because” between “mother” and “the man.” (And “Joey” was capitalized twice because the word-recognition program simply repeated the word once Jamie hit “j,” on the theory that a user would be likely to use the same j-word twice.)

Once again, Rosemary praised Jamie—but then she said, “ah, but now I have a question, Jamie.” Jamie turned his full attention to her.  “Is it right for the man to do this?”

“He understands the concept of ‘fair,’” I interjected.  Thanks once again to Harry Potter and the many miscarriages of justice depicted therein, from Sirius Black’s conviction to Dolores Umbridge’s brutal punishments of Harry, Jamie also knows the concept of “innocence.” I’ve also glossed the line, “he’s crying out that he was framed,” from Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” by reference to Sirius Black.  OK, so it’s not Rawls’ Theory of Justice.  Give me a break.  Harry Potter has the distinct advantage of being narrative.

“Is it fair for the man to drive the joey away from its mother?” asked Rosemary.

Jamie, with her guidance, went back to the keyboard:

I think we should leave wild animals in the wild.

“Oh, very good, very good.  Now that raises a very good question, Jamie,” Rosemary said.  “What do you think about zoos?  Is it all right to capture animals and put them in the zoo?”

I sat on my hands for this one.  As you know, Jamie has been to zoos all over the Western world.  He always pays attention during the nature shows, and he understands that some animals are endangered by human predators and by environmental change.  He is so down with the argument that sharks have more to fear from us than we do from them, and he knows which species are not harmful to humans.  And he knows how zoos get their animals and care for them.  So I kept as quiet as a rabbit or a mouse.  And here’s what he produced:

Guess you are right.  The think ing thing to do is to keep just the minimum number of animals in zoos so we find out about them without having to chase them.

Well, now. The think ing thing to do?  The phrase made me wonder whether, in fact, Jamie had such a sentence fully-formed in mentalese before he began typing, or whether he’d made it up (again, with Rosemary at his elbow) on the fly, as he chose among his options afforded him by the computer.  It certainly didn’t sound like the Jamie I knew, but then, why would it?  And then just the minimum number of animals.  My spider sense went off at that one, too.  It sounded as if Jamie had an entire position paper on animal rights and species preservation at his fingertips, just waiting for FC to come along and dig it out.

I asked him about this sentence later, after the session was over.  “What were you saying about animals in zoos?”

“They would be safe,” Jamie replied.  “They would survive.”

OK, so he was certainly think ing something along those lines!  These two sentences alone were more than I’d ever heard him say on the subject (and that was his first conversational use of “survive,” so far as I know), so Rosemary had obviously gotten him going, and he obviously had something to say.  I pressed on.  “But you said we should just keep the ‘minimum number’ in zoos.  Do you know what ‘minimum’ means?”

“Tell me,” Jamie said—though he says this even when he knows the answer.

“It means ‘the least amount.’ Do you want to keep just the least amount of animals in zoos?”

“We could have lots of animals in zoos,” Jamie replied.  “And take care of them.”

Very well, so it’s possible that he meant we should keep just the maximum number in zoos.  So maybe Rosemary led him on a bit—or maybe he simply chose one of the available words from the program, without being quite sure what it meant.

I think the same thing happened with the next picture, which showed a small girl, a big ape, and the Empire State Building.  Jamie’s response to this picture was:

The little girl really got scared when doing her school excursion they went to see king kong.

Again, the thing that jumps out is “excursion.” Jamie knows the phrases “school trip” and “field trip,” but “excursion” didn’t sound like it was in Jamie’s repertoire.  But then again, maybe he was just choosing “excursion” once it popped up on the screen along with words like “exercise” and “experiment.” “Doing her school excursion” ain’t exactly kosher in terms of usage, after all, and Jamie’s punctuation and capitalization were a bit off too.  So it wasn’t as if he’d produced the Gettysburg Address.  But Jamie is, in fact, fascinated with King Kong (especially the scene involving what we now call “the islanders,” Scott Eric Kaufmann, white courtesy phone!), and the bulk of the sentence is altogether plausible. 

Jamie and Rosemary produced three more sentences.  Two were addressed directly to Rosemary:

You get people with down syndrome typing how can I type better than I do.

I think you know the right way to type.

Possibly a bit suspicious, sure, insofar as they serve as advertisements for the process under way, but once again, I believe they’re within Jamie’s range.  When he was in sixth grade, he had to type sentences about his spelling words, and though he liked it, the amount of time required for his hunting-and-pecking always discouraged him.  With this program, by contrast, he was typing one or two letters, a number, and shazam! Words appeared on the screen and were magically spoken aloud.  And the more Jamie typed, the faster and more fluent he got.  I was sure of this much: he was really enjoying himself.

And then, just as the hour was ending, Rosemary asked him if there was anything he’d like to say about current affairs.  The answer:

Israel is not very happy with Lebanon and they have been shelling Beirut.

I didn’t believe that one for a moment. 

Now, I might have been underestimating Jamie again, but still, this one looked fishy to me.  He’d never uttered a word like this in his life.  I mentioned it to Janet when I called her that night, and she said that maybe, just maybe he and his teachers had said something about Israel and Lebanon in summer school.  But I’d just grilled him about that sentence after the session was over—lightly, mind you, with a splash of olive oil and butter.  In response, Jamie said something about war in Iraq, and asked me to tell about Israel.  Jamie knows about war in Iraq, and he knows that US soldiers are there, even if, like most of the American public, he isn’t entirely sure why.  Jamie also knows where Israel and Lebanon are; he’s remarkably good at geography (way better than most of his fellow citizens) and knows most of the Middle East.  But “shelling”?  “shelling Beirut”?  Rosemary, I thought, had done a bit of overreaching there. Any FC skeptics watching that sentence appear would surely remain FC skeptics.

But then another thought occurred to me: what if that sentence had been wholly Rosemary’s, and she was simply showing Jamie how to produce such sentences with the help of the word-recognition program?  Then it wouldn’t be a question of whether Jamie had had such a mental sentence fully formed in his head, waiting to be unlocked by FC; it would be a question of whether Jamie could be induced to see himself as a producer of such a sentence.  In other words, even in the worst-case scenario, maybe Rosemary wasn’t ventriloquizing Jamie so much as showing him what the program—and what he—could do.

It was a thought.  I juggled it with a bunch of other thoughts as Jamie and I drove around the campus area, looking for Indian food and movies and our hotel.  Among those other thoughts was the reflection that whatever the merits of FC, Rosemary had worked with Jamie generously and solicitously, and had asked him some great questions.

Once we checked in at the Anton Pannekoek Hotel and Council Communist Center, I asked Jamie again about Israel, Lebanon, and animals in zoos.  He said, good-naturedly, “Michael, you asked me that already.” True enough, so I simply asked him if he’d had a good time and if he’d liked Rosemary.  To this I received two very enthusiastic yeses.

And then the first of two curious things happened.  We tried to open the door to our room, but the keycard wouldn’t work.  Frustrated (we were tired, and we’d waited forever for an elevator), I informed Jamie that we would have to return to the lobby for another key.  He started to fuss and complain, which was normal enough, and then, surprisingly, he asked, “what if they don’t let us back in?”

Quoi? I’d expected him to be a bit fussy, since he was weary, but I hadn’t expected this.

“You mean you’re worried that they won’t give another key?”

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “What if they don’t give us any key?”

I assured him that that wouldn’t happen, but I noted that he’d been a bit more articulate about his worries than he usually is. 

Still, it wasn’t a major breakthrough or anything.  He just seemed a bit more confident in expressing himself, that’s all.  So I put that thought next to all the others.

And then a few hours later, at dinner, he started playing his “animal hangman” game with me.  In this game, he draws X number of blank spaces (lately, he’s gotten to the point at which he can spell the words to himself mentally, visualize them, and draw the appropriate number of spaces—this is all quite new and exciting), and I have to guess letters, and so forth.  Mind you, he doesn’t go for things like “cat” and “pig”; he prefers animals like “Port Jackson shark” and “bull elephant seal.” Real challenges, both for him and for me. Suddenly, he interrupted the game to ask me a question.

“Michael,” he said, “how do you spell ‘composition’?”

Did I hear that right? “Uh,” I stammered.  “Here, let me write it out.” As I did, Jamie stopped me.  “No, not composition,” he said. ”Competition.”

“Oh!  Sorry.” I wrote out “competition.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said.  “How do you spell ‘delusion’?”

At this I practically spat up my saag paneer.  He knows the word “delusional,” as it happens, because of Ferdinand the Duck’s misguided and futile effort to persuade Babe the Pig not to pursue the animals captured in the raid in Babe 2: Pig in the City (a brilliant and vastly underrated film):

Pig, you are unraveling!  A, they are long gone; B, they were not nice people; C is for kamikaze, and D is for delusional, which is what you are in the head.  You’re just a little pig in the big city.  What can you do?  What can anybody do? Why even try?

It’s a great speech.  Jamie and I rehearse it all the time.  But he’d never, never asked me how to spell “delusion” before.  Clearly, he was thinking hard about his session with Rosemary that afternoon, and clearly, in thinking of words like “competition” and “delusion,” he was thinking about words he’d feel more confident about writing if only he knew how to spell them.

Well, that decided things for me.  I asked him if he’d like to get “the computer game” that Rosemary used, the Intellitalk 3, and he gave me a big thumbs up.  And then we finished dinner, and off we went to see Monster House.

Now, I know this isn’t a definitive endorsement of Facilitated Communication.  But it is a report that when Jamie worked with a word-recognition program and some friendly help from Rosemary, he was able to try out some unfamiliar words and then to think about how to write some complicated familiar ones.  That, in turn, helped him to form more complex sentences on the screen than he can manage in daily speech.  I’m sure that if Jamie didn’t have to spend so much time and energy worrying about how to spell the words he knows, he’d type and communicate more fluently than he does now.  And why would I be so concerned about his typing, when his speech is reasonably intelligible and coherent?  Because Jamie, unfortunately, not only has a little trouble vocalizing his words; he’s also burdened with laryngomalacia and oral-motor deficits and a father who speaks too quickly.  The end result is that he’s often quite hard to understand.  Thank goodness he has so much patience with us.

My tentative conclusion is this.  For kids with expressive speech delays, there’s really nothing to be lost by checking out FC and seeing what kind of assistive technology might actually be of some assistance.  The major controversies over FC are, I’m both sorry and relieved to say, largely irrelevant to Jamie:  he can speak on his own; he says plenty of smart and insightful and surprising things even if he telescopes them into a few condensed words; he’s let us know, in various ways, that he thinks seriously about life and death (particularly the deaths of loved ones) and, lately, the Middle East: he wants to know what’s going on over there, and whether there could be bombs and rockets in Pennsylvania as well.  Finally, of course, there will be no question of whether Janet or I will be guiding his fingers to the keys, so the ouija-board question—of whether the facilitator or the facilitatee is really doing the communicating—is moot.

I still don’t know what to say about FC with regard to people with severe and profound disabilities, or people seemingly incapable of communicating at all.  But I still believe that too many people with disabilities are misdiagnosed as nonfunctioning and noncommunicative, and that, given our lousy track record of such misdiagnoses, we should place the burden of proof on anyone who declares that person X is incapable of communicating, and we should offer the benefit of the doubt (though not a free pass, mind you) to people who are willing to think otherwise.

And I’m definitely getting Jamie an Intellitalk 3.

Posted by Michael on 08/24 at 08:45 AM
Jamie • (45) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Jamie’s trip to Syracuse, part one

A month ago, Jamie and I drove up to Syracuse to meet Rosemary Crossley, the author of Speechless:  Facilitating Communication for People Without Voices and one of the leading practitioners of “facilitated communication.” I mentioned this briefly on the blog at the time; in fact, I tried to bury it in an ABF Friday post about what makes a cult classic “classic.” I even tossed in an endorsement of a Tony Judt essay on the fate of Israel.  Despite all this camouflage, though, my first commenter, Peter Sattler, picked up on the reference to Crossley:

“Jamie and I are off to Syracuse to meet the author of this book and see what she says about his communication skills.”

I parsed and reparsed this sentence for irony, but sadly could find none.  I trust, however, that you are far from being taken in by the magical thinking of that thoroughly discredited technique, Facilitated Communication.  Indeed, insofar as FC is concerned, you could probably find out what Crossley has to say about Jamie’s (or anyone’s) communication skills without his being anywhere near Syracuse.

If I’ve misread or misspoke, I apologize.  May you find what you’re looking for.

A bit later, a second commenter stopped by to explain a bit more about why FC is so controversial:

The method was used with individuals who had severe-profound disabilities. Mostly the problems arose because the participants could not express any recognizable intentions and the question arose, who is choosing the letters the participant or instructor? And there was no way to figure that out!

A third commenter added this link, which lays out the case against FC quite clearly, although it unfortunately tosses in a bit about repressed memory therapy for good measure:

Facilitated Communication (FC) is a technique which allegedly allows communication by those who were previously unable to communicate by speech or signs due to autism, mental retardation, brain damage, or such diseases as cerebral palsy. The technique involves a facilitator who places her hand over that of the patient’s hand, arm or wrist, which is placed on a board or keyboard with letters, words or pictures. The patient is allegedly able to communicate through his or her hand to the hand of the facilitator which then is guided to a letter, word or picture, spelling out words or expressing complete thoughts. Through their facilitators, previously mute patients recite poems, carry on high level intellectual conversations, or simply communicate. Parents are grateful to discover that their child is not hopelessly retarded but is either normal or above normal in intelligence. FC allows their children to demonstrate their intelligence; it provides them with a vehicle heretofore denied them. But is it really their child who is communicating? Most skeptics believe that the only one doing the communication is the facilitator. The American Psychological Association has issued a position paper on FC, stating that “Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that facilitated communication is not a scientifically valid technique for individuals with autism or mental retardation” and describing FC as “a controversial and unproved communicative procedure with no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy.”

Jim Easter added, “you certainly do have some of us scratching our heads”; Kristina Chew, the mother of a child with autism, said, “I am curious about what you learn about FC in Syracuse. We have thought more than once about this for Charlie, despite the controversy surrounding it and autistic persons”; and finally I was warned, “Oh, Michael, no, no.  Facilitated Communication has all the characteristics of a hustle.”

So the next morning, before Jamie and I set out for our return trip, I posted the following in the comments section, way way down:

What I discovered yesterday is that he learns very quickly how to use word-recognition software, and that’s a good thing.  And yet, jre (comment 39), Jamie does not, in fact, communicate very well.  He’s quite clever, observant, and thoughtful, but his expressive delays are far more significant than any other aspect of his disability, which means (a) there’s a great deal of iceberg under the water and (b) there’s no harm trying to find out whether we can get any more of that iceberg above the water.  But Chris (comment 47) is right:  FC can stir up more fights than an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.  So I’ll blog about Jamie’s visit with Rosemary Crossley in a future post, possibly late next week.

Note that I said “possibly.”

But those of you who read this blog regularly probably have some idea of how I handle controversial things like the Middle East, the “radical” “left,” and Facilitated Communication: I wander around and think about them for a while, and I get back to them when I get back to them.  (By the bye, my weeklong series on the differences between the democratic left and the “radical” “left” has gotten a number of responses from that quarter.  You’ll recall that I criticized them for, among other things, uncritically supporting Hezbollah and the Iraqi resistance.  In a series of devastating rebuttals, they’ve affirmed their support for Hezbollah and the Iraqi resistance.  Well, that’ll show me!) But at least when it comes to politics and such things, I can draw on about thirty years of more-or-less conscious life and a good deal of reading.  With FC, by contrast, I’m kind of at sea.  So, in this first post of a two-part series, I’ll just spell out my inchoate sense of the controversy.

I share some of the skepticism about FC, for fairly obvious reasons.  The history of people with disabilities is also a history of extraordinary snake-oil “remedies” and “cures” for disability; when Jamie was little, the most pressing controversy in the world of Down syndrome concerned the nootropic drug piracetam, which was claimed to have miraculous effects on the brain functions of children with DS.  Janet and I looked over the assorted claims for piracetam and vitamin therapy and decided that though we’d have none of the piracetam, thank you, Jamie would probably do well with antioxidants, because it seems that the extra 21st chromosome leads to (among other things) an overproduction of free radicals and some messing-up (apologies for the technical term) of the body’s biochemistry on the cellular level.  We noted, for example, that Jamie loves to eat ketchup—on hot dogs, sandwiches, eggs, and by itself—and we imagined that his body liked the lycopene.  Then again, Jamie also loves blue cheese dressing, so go figure.  Anyway, multivitamins aren’t very intrusive.  But we were not going to go so far as to put any odd drugs in his body in the hope of “curing” his disability, and we’re basically leery of everything in general.  There are, indeed, all kinds of creepy people with Better Brain Institutes who claim that their patented Elixi-Lot will cure ADHD, autism, cerebral palsy, pervasive developmental delay, and scrofula.  (What’s “pervasive developmental delay,” you ask?  It basically means “we have no idea what’s going on.")

On the other hand, I am skeptical of some of the FC skeptics as well.  They often speak in the name of Science, and yet when you examine the Science on which they rely, it often turns out to be the Science of education or the Science of psychology.  (When I capitalize Science in this way, you’re supposed to hear it shouted in the stentorian voice from Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science,” and you’re supposed to think of people using the authority of Science as a cover for an array of decidedly non-scientific or soft-scientific claims.  Astrophysics, for example, is a science.  So are biochemistry and paleontology.  Economics and psychology are something else altogether, and when we mere mortals try to point out how much they rely on ordinary human interpretation, we are sometimes told that we should not question Science.) Yes, the American Psychological Association has a position paper on FC, and they’re agin’ it.  Noted.  But I also note that the fields of psychology and psychiatry have a long history of trying to medicalize nonmedical conditions, and their track record with regard to theories of brain function is rather spotty.  For example, on balance, FC seems to me far less controversial or harmful than lobotomy or electroshock therapy—just to pick two very widespread practices embraced by the advocates of Science in the fairly recent past.  So the very fervor with which FC is denounced, in some quarters, sets off my spider sense.  When I run into FC debates I always feel like I’ve blundered into the wrong room—as if I’ve wandered into a seminar full of psychiatrists while wearing an “I heart Thomas Szasz” button on my lapel, or as if I’ve wandered into a seminar full of anti-psychiatrists while wearing a “Thomas Szasz is a fraud” button.  (I have never done either.  I don’t know what to make of Thomas Szasz.  So don’t even go there, unless you want to bear out my “wrong room” theory.)

All of which is to say that I went to Syracuse with an open mind.  I don’t think Rosemary Crossley and Chris Borthwick are falsifying their compelling accounts of the people with whom they’ve worked; I think Doug Biklen’s work is for real; I do think that much of the nondisabled world is far too quick to write off the communicative capacities of people with neurophysical or intellectual disabilities, and that this can have tragic consequences, particularly when we’re dealing with people who have suffered traumatic brain injury; and yet I didn’t expect that Jamie would produce the Gettysburg Address after an hour with Rosemary, either.  I merely wanted to see what he’d do with facilitation, and whether it would be worth it to buy him some word-recognition software to help him communicate via keyboard. 

I put up my blog post at 1 am that Friday morning, then got a bit of sleep before striking out at 8:30 for what I thought would be four hours’ drive to Syracuse.  Our appointment with Rosemary was scheduled for 1:30.  That drive turned out to be at once epic and comic: in Pennsylvania we were stuck behind construction vehicles.  In southern New York we were diverted onto tiny two-lane roads, and then treated to the mess of rubble and wire and traffic cones that is route 17.  Abandoning 17 for 13 through Ithaca, we waited along with a few dozen other cars while a maintenance truck repainted the white line on the shoulder.  Then we waited behind a municipal bus all the way to Dryden.  Then in Cortland, as we tried to hook up with Interstate 81, we found ourselves, I swear to Ba’al, behind the weaving Malibu from Repo Man, and even as we made our way up the onramp at last, we were stopped by not one, but two cars slowing down and pulling off to the side of the ramp.  By that point it was 1 pm, and we were 30 miles from Syracuse.

We showed up at 1:33.  Don’t ask how.

Two other peripheral things about our trip: I had booked a discount room via Priceline at the Marx Hotel and Conference Center, even though I was not convinced that the hotel would be sufficiently dialectical.  Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that the Marx Hotel was the very same hotel at which my Greater New York City Ice Hockey League All-Stars had stayed in 1972, when we played in the statewide tournament and lost in the finals to Clinton, 3-2.  Talk about the lattice of coincidence!  And it was the very same hotel in which I’d stayed two years later with another hockey team after the statewide tournament, even though the tournament that year was way up in the frozen tundra of Potsdam (which I’ll be visiting this November!).  But on the way back along I-90, our team bus had hit an icy patch in a blizzard, and we crashed into the median strip ten miles east of Syracuse.  We were being blown all over the road, and our crafty driver managed to avoid going right off an overpass and plunging into a stream; instead he swung back and crashed us, relatively safely, into the grass of the strip.  But one of the parents broke an arm nonetheless, and a couple of kids were bruised and cut.  We made local news in Syracuse, and they put us up at . . . the Marx Hotel, which was a Holiday Inn at the time.

Now, how did I remember that this was the same hotel?  Well, I have a pretty good memory, as you might have gathered by now.  But more important, this hotel is a 16-sided thing twenty stories high.  Can you imagine how a bunch of prepubescent hockey players behaved in a hotel with circular corridors and endless possibilities for chases on the stairs?  Let’s just say you’d remember it too.

Anyway, they’ve redone the hotel completely in the intervening 30 years, and renamed it after Karl Marx.  The appointments are very nice, and the Grundrisse Breakfast Special can’t be beat.  I recommend the place to anyone traveling in the area and looking for an alternative to the string of German Idealist “Geistesgeschichte” hotels that dot upstate New York.

Peripheral thing number two: that night Jamie and I went to the mall to see Monster House.  Reasonably entertaining for the first half, particularly if you (like me) lived across from a Monster House when you were a kid.  (Perhaps I’ll write about that one of these days, too.) But then it turns out that the Monster House is a Monster House because it’s got the spirit of a real monster in it—the former Fat Lady from a freak show, a vicious and bitter woman who was accidentally buried in the foundation by her husband, and whose evil spirit now wreaks its revenge on neighborhood kids who. . . .

Excuse me? Can I ask just who the hell thought that was a good story idea?

Oh, you want to know how the FC session went.  Stay tuned til tomorrow!

Posted by Michael on 08/23 at 09:55 AM
Jamie • (36) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Friday, June 30, 2006

Wakeup call

Traveling with Jamie is like nothing else in the world.  He loves everything about traveling—the packing, the driving, the airport, the rental car, the hotel, the actual destination (wherever it may be), and the pool (for there must be a pool).  So even though we had to drive three hours to Pittsburgh in pouring rain, fly to Seattle, then drive another three hours to the border, then drive to the Vancouver Aquarium the next day, he loved all of it—and when we got back to our hotel Monday evening, he accompanied me to the gym, where we did a light 20 minutes on bikes, ran around the track, tried out the leg press, played racquetball (he’s gotten much better at this!  despite using a racquet much smaller than the ones he’s used to!), went swimming, and played ping pong.  The next day, he sat quietly at the back of a large room for 90 minutes, accompanied (as good luck would have it) by my department head, Robert Caserio, and played Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on my laptop (with the sound off) while I did my bit as a member of the MLA Task Force on the Evaluation of Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.  (The Inside Higher Ed story on the task force, from last year’s MLA, is here.) Then we grabbed some lunch and headed off to the golf course, which turned out to be extremely challenging, though I would’ve broken 90 if I hadn’t taken a nine on 14, or a 14 on nine, I forget which.  It was a “greed is weird” kind of course, with “exclusive” houses that rested maybe twenty or thirty yards from every fairway.  I mean, I realize that “developers” have to do this kind of thing, but would you want to own a house with a tiny backyard that sat right next to the fairway bunker of a hole on which prudent golfers would take an iron off the tee?  Then it was back in the pool for an evening swim, off Wednesday to Vancouver’s Capilano Suspension Bridge and the Grouse Mountain skyride, then back to Seattle for a midnight flight to Pittsburgh and the three-hour drive back to State College.  Jamie was exceptionally good about getting ready for bed at the airport, even though this initially made no sense to him.  He asked only for a glass of chocolate milk before he had to brush his teeth, and when I explained to him that most of the shops and stores in the Seattle-Tacoma airport were closed, he said “we should ask,” and promptly stopped a person at random: “do you know where there is chocolate milk?” (I explained to Jamie that this somewhat nice man—he merely half-smiled at the question—did not work at the airport.) We found a Starbucks shortly thereafter, and Jamie decided he would wait on a bench near security while I got some water for me and some chocolate milk for him.  I was being served just as they began to close up shop at 10 pm: I knew it would cause Jamie some distress to see his father being trapped in Starbucks behind the metal grate (aha! that’s how they “recruit” their employees!), so I looked back, and sure enough, there he was on his bench with his hands to his cheeks and his mouth open in the “Home Alone” position.  I gave him the thumbs-up to let him know I could get out again, though, and came back in a minute or two with his freshly-mixed chocolate milk.

Sometimes Jamie can be . . . well, something of a challenge.  On our way up to Vancouver on Wednesday, he announced that we were “running out of film.” I assured him that he was quite wrong about this, because I knew that there were twelve exposures left on the disposable camera we’d bought at the aquarium.  Janet took Jamie’s digital camera with her to Ireland three weeks ago.  And why did we splurge and buy Jamie his own digital camera in the first place?  Funny you asked!  When we sat down to lunch al fresco at a little restaurant across from the Capilano Bridge, I watched him drinking his soda and said, “you look so cool like that—hold on and I’ll take your picture,” whereupon I discovered that there was, in fact, no film left in the camera.

“We’re running out,” Jamie said, just as he had noted an hour or two earlier.

“Ah, I see,” I replied.  “You mean that when we got into Canada and I left you in the car while I went to get Canadian dollars, you took all the pictures in the camera?  And then you told me we were running out of film?”

“Yes,” Jamie said, with a wry smile. “Are you gonna sigh?”

“No,” I sighed, “we’ll just get another camera, you ignatz.”

“Say, ‘oh, what am I gonna do with you,’” Jamie demanded.  This is a line from Curious George, but Jamie finds it appropriate at such moments.

“Yes, Jamie, that was a very Curious George thing to do, to use up all the film and take all the pictures in the car.  What am I gonna do with you?” He merely grinned and rubbed his hands together.

At the end of lunch, I told him we both had to go to the men’s room before we went to the bridge.  But he didn’t want me to go with him.  He insisted, instead, that he would go into the restaurant alone and find the bathroom all by himself.  I approved, reminding him to ask a server if he couldn’t find it right away, and I told him I would wait for the check.  He came back in a few minutes, hands washed and everything, all set to go.  But the check still hadn’t arrived, even though we were now one of only two parties in the place.  “Let’s go,” Jamie insisted.  “We’re still waiting for the check,” I replied.  “Why?” he asked.  “I don’t know why,” I said.  Finally, our server arrived, and I had the credit card ready for her, and soon we were all paid up.  I told Jamie to wait at the table while I went to the men’s room.  When I returned, Jamie was waiting very patiently . . . but my spider sense told me to check the check, and sure enough, on the $23.51 bill, Jamie had written, just under my “$30.00,” the figure “$90.51.” I gave him a sidelong look.

“Say, ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’” Jamie said.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I dutifully replied.  “You cannot leave ninety dollars on this check.  It is too much money.” Jamie grinned again.  “No, really.  Don’t do that, please.  It will make our server very confused, and besides, thirty dollars is really enough.” Jamie understands tipping.  He’s just not clear on the details.

On the other hand, Jamie is (as I’ve mentioned before on this blog) an exceptionally thoughtful creature, so much so that when we got home yesterday I taught him a brand new word for describing what he’s like: conscientious.  After we’d dropped off the rental car Wednesday night, and I informed him that I would change out of my shorts and into jeans for our late-night flight, Jamie objected: “Michael,” he advised me, “you should not be naked in public.” “No, sweetie,” I assured him.  “We’ll change in the men’s room at the airport, and you’ll brush your teeth and take out your retainers.  Do you want to wear long pants on the plane?”

“No,” he said after some deliberation.  “I’m OK in shorts.” And he was.  Then when we learned that our plane would be an hour late, thanks to all the foul weather in the northeast, I told Jamie that we would have to wait until after midnight before we could board.  We set up shop on a little couch-like structure right by our gate, and Jamie played Harry Potter on the laptop for a bit.  At eleven I asked him if he wanted to stretch out with his pillow on the couch.  “Are you sleepy?”

“Um, a little bit,” he said, “not that sleepy.”

“You’re not that sleepy?  I am very sleepy,” I admitted.

“You sleep,” Jamie suggested, “I will play Harry Potter right here.”

“Oh, thank you, Jamie.  That’s very sweet.  But I don’t want to fall asleep and miss our plane.” I knew there was no chance of him wandering off, but still, sleeping on the job is sleeping on the job.

“Michael!  You will not miss the plane!” Jamie said.  “I will tell you when it comes.”

I looked at him with genuine surprise.  “You will tell me when the plane comes?”

“Uh huh,” he said.  “Now you sleep right here.”

Well, one of the side benefits of all this travel is that Jamie learns new ways of being independent, like finding restaurant bathrooms by himself.  But this seemed a bit much.  On the other hand, what could possibly happen?  I would be right next to him, and I certainly wouldn’t sleep so heavily as to be unable to snap to attention if a passing lunatic tried to mess with him in some way.  And I would just close my eyes for a second. . . .  But . . . how would he know when the plane arrived. . . .

Twenty minutes later, Jamie jostled my elbow.  “Wake up, Michael,” he said gently. “Our plane is here.” And sure enough, the passengers had just begun to disembark.  Jamie had been watching carefully the whole time, even while dodging dementors and imps and skeleton men in the dungeons of Hogwarts.  Because, you see, he is very conscientious.  Also observant and mature and independent.  Also great.

So what am I going to do with him?  I will thank him for being such a great traveler and a great kid.  Thank you, Jamie.

***

I have two end-of-month announcements.  One is that I have decided to take Joe Lieberman seriously.  You’ll probably recall that earlier this month, he described himself as a lonely, principled individual fighting to keep the Democratic Party alive:

”I know I’m taking a position that is not popular within the party,” Lieberman told Broder, “but that is a challenge for the party—whether it will accept diversity of opinion or is on a kind of crusade or jihad of its own to have everybody toe the line.  No successful political party has ever done that.”

Most sane people have found this to be an outrageous remark, one that perfectly encapsulates the reasons why Lieberman should go down to defeat.  “It’s called a primary challenge, you ass,” these people say, “not a ‘crusade’ or a ‘jihad.’” And on the subject of Iraq, inquiring minds want to know:  exactly when did the Democrats get themselves a party line?

But I say, never mind these quibbles!  embrace the jihad! This blog hereby calls for a democratic jihad.  The demands of democratic jihad are not negotiable!  We insist that there be “elections” in which “voters” choose among “candidates” for “office.” We further insist that these “elections” be held on an “election day” and that there be reliable mechanisms for tabulating and reporting the “votes” cast by the “voters.” Lastly, we insist that the “candidate” who gets the most “votes” in the “election” should hold the “office” for which he or she was “running.”

We know we are taking a position that is not popular within the party.  Many people considered it too divisive and partisan a stance in 2000, and most professional politicians and their advisors consider it similarly unwise today.  But democratic jihad will not be satisfied with half-measures!  We hold aloft the flaming sword of primary-challenge extremism, and we shall not be moved!

We will call our primary-challenge jihad/crusade “Operation Infinite Justice.” Because it has a kinda nice ring to it, don’t you think?

The second announcement is that I am taking another two-weeks-or-so blogging break, this time to join Janet in some remote corner of the world.  Jamie’s coming along, and I hope he’ll wake me up when our plane arrives.  Nick will be in charge of homestead security.

In the meantime, I will leave you in the extremely capable hands of two of the sharpest, most versatile writers in all of left blogistan.  Please welcome the magnificent Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise (check out her new blog photo, too!) and the magnanimous Chris Clarke of the Creek That Runneth North (check out his blog . . . er . . . portrait!) Thanks, Lindsay!  Thanks, Chris!  This humble blog considers it an honor to have you as distinguished guests.

I’ll be back on July 17.

UPDATE:  About that Chris Clarke.  If you’re not familiar with his work—and if not, why not?—check out his Eliotic parody of Jeff Goldstein (he of Protein Wisdom), available on a blog near you.  This is why we call him the wittiest fellow on the Internets everything that’s beautiful about humanity (see Josh in comment 16).

Posted by Michael on 06/30 at 11:32 AM
Jamie • (20) Comments • (6) Trackbacks • Permalink
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