Autism – A Creek Runs Through It

May 1, 2016May 2, 2016

The List of Things I’ve Already Done

Once upon a time, in the year 2002, during the my first summer as a married grown-up paying a mortgage to live in the house I grew up in on Duffy’s Creek, a small child went missing from the family next door because he was watching me scrub the green shit off the siding on the side of our little house, which is one of the many small joys of living on brackish water. Sort of like being Born on The Bayou, but not quite as cool. But I can still hear my old hound dog barking, chasin’ down a who do there. Chasin’ down a who do there.

I knew the small child. I guess he was about four years old. He’s the oldest son of one of the daughters of the people who used to live next door. I grew up with them. So I knew him and he knew me. And I knew his parents. And his grandparents, his uncles, his aunt, his great uncles and great aunts, and his great-grandparents for that matter. They’re all really nice people.

But being two years away from becoming a father myself, I didn’t realize how bugfuck you could get, and how quickly you could get bugfuck, if your kid disappeared. I thought the people next door knew that the four year-old boy was standing watching me scrub the green shit off the side of the house. I had no idea they were looking for him. And while they were looking for him, he and I were engaged in a fascinating and wonderful conversation, a line from which has become one of my all-time favorites. Here’s approximately how it went:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m cleaning this green stuff off the side of the house.”

“Why?”

“To make the house look nice. I had some time this afternoon, and it was bugging me. It’s been on my list of things to do for a long time now.”

“You have a list of things to do?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Do you have a list of things you’ve already done?”

(I stop dead in my tracks). “You know what? I don’t. But I should.”

“You should.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

At this point, the young boy’s mother came running around the corner of the house frantically looking for him, and got pretty annoyed at me when she found him. And rightly so, as the first thing I should done when he wandered over was call over to their yard and tell them he was here. Again, I thought they know. No matter, as far as I know he’s about college age now, and doing well I’m sure. And he left me with a gem of a line that day:

A List of Things I’ve Already Done.

If you’re among the landed gentry, and you’re the co-CEO one of those little business called two jobs, a kid in school, a house, two cars, four animals and a garden, It’s a great stress beater that you can fall back on when you’re immediate List Of Things To Do becomes overwhelming. It makes you feel less whelmed. You take a step back and you consider what you HAVE accomplished already, and you think, “well, at least I did that. That’s on The List Of Things I’ve Already Done.”

There are things that are only on the list temporarily, of course. The kitty litter tracks and Mookie hair have to be vacuumed out of the carpet on a regular basis. I have to go hunting and gathering at the King Kullen pretty much every Friday night. And the school year is a ten-month ferris wheel. (I think I just admitted what I do for a living).

Then there are the annual things, especially in the springtime. Spreading seed, cleaning out the garden beds, cultivatin’, throwing down cow and/or chicken shit. Sunday April 23rd was the annual Early Spring Power Washing of the brick patios. It’s a beast of a job, especially since the handle of the power washer leaks now and I was completely soaked to the bone after an elapsed five hours of cleaning every brick with a 1400 pound per square inch stream of water about the width of a pencil eraser, but it makes the patio look brand new, and that makes me really, really happy, and it makes Trisha really, really happy because the patio is our happy, happy place. So I do it. Every Spring. And it was bubbling up on my List Of Things To Do since about the middle of March. But it was a really cold Spring up ’till about two weeks ago, which was OK by me ’cause I got in a couple of good naps.

12642547_10208483979242212_3620627975554408540_n — Our new roof and siding being installed in January.

And besides, the Annual Power Washing was especially sweet this year because we had the roof and siding replaced on the house, amazingly enough during the last week of January. If you’re on Long Island and you’re roof is falling down, call The Dude’s good friend John Roth at Responsible Remodeling. They are the single best company we’ve ever done business with, and the house looks brand new, at least the outside of it. The roof and siding were a gigantic elephant stepping on the head of The List of Things To Do. But because Trisha works really hard and is really good and successful at what she does, which of course I still don’t understand after sixteen and a half years, we were able to move it to the List Of Things We’ve Already Done, which makes up both happy every time we think of it. The house looks beautiful, a pretty little white Cape Cod with black shutters and no tiles missing from the roof and no water leaking into the laundry room, and it would sell a lot faster and for a lot more if we ever decide we have to get the hell out of here and buy that house on Main Street in Copake Falls. You sleep better at night knowing that. And there’s no green shit growing on the white vinyl siding anymore, so for the moment, that never even has to go on The List Of Things To Do, and I spend less time with the power washer, which at this point I’m perfectly fine with.

IS5ilqmynyszgj0000000000 — 13 Main Street Copake Falls, NY. On an acre of land for $209,000. I play Powerball weekly.

But once the weather gets nice, there’s a gigantic List of Things To Do. Some are amazingly complicated. Some you look at for months until you finally find the ten minutes that it actually takes to do them.

Sometime in the 1980’s, my mother had a white dogwood tree planted in the front yard. It was a tribute to her Aunt Nanny, who either had a white dogwood tree or really liked white dogwood trees. I really have no idea. Longtime readers know she talked a lot. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful tree, but when we fenced off the side yard in 2002 (and created “the Secret Garden”), the gate (which has needed replacement for four years, and sits stubbornly on the List Of Things To Do) opened right into the lower branches of the tree, so I raised it and turned into into a kind of big white dogwood umbrella with no lower branches, which is not a very nice thing to do to a white dogwood tree.

Then we put in the stone walled gardens when the great Valley Stream stone artist Alex Hoerlin built us a new driveway, front path and stoop in 2006, which buried the dogwood in six inches of topsoil. Then Hurricane Sandy swamped it and everything else in two feet of creek water in 2012. None of this, of course, was what the white dogwood signed up for thirty years ago, so as we embarked on 2016, it was a complete goner. Meanwhile, two small Wichita Blue junipers that I planted along the edge of the property line had become mostly Wichita Brown junipers. They had five years or so and they weren’t going anywhere except the brush pile. So I decided to pull them out, cut the dead tree down to the stump and plant a new white dogwood where the junipers were. Plus I needed something for the empty space in the backyard where we took out the Bradford Pear that wanted to kill us in the Hurricane, and I figured Dave (you don’t know Dave, but I do, and that’s all that matters) might give me a deal on two white dogwoods, and I’d have one for the backyard, too. ‘Cause they really are beautiful trees, and of course I carry a certain amount of guilt for killing my mother’s white dogwood tree. (The bradford pear was hers, too, but I couldn’t give a damn about that).

205049_1011628630734_5021864_n — Trisha and The 5 Year-Old Dude under the white dogwood tree, circa 2009. This was the first photo I ever posted on facebook. I’m thinking it’s being used to sell grass seed in Slovokia. Or something.

So around the first week of April, The Dude and I started sawing away at the dead white dogwood tree. The Dude enjoys work that involves physical pressure and force. It’s one of those sensory things with ASD and Asperger’s Syndrome. He’s in charge of peeling carrots and potatoes. He enjoys vacuuming and washing cars. And off course anything that involves using sharp grown up tools is an added bonus. As you’ll notice in the picture at the top of this post, he has a little way to go to get that last bit of stump off. Then I’m going to let him drill a giant hole in the middle of it and stick a post in it to hang a flower basket. This is something that can sit calmly for awhile on The List Of Things To Do.

Digging up the Mostly Dead Wichita Blue (Brown) Junipers jumped quickly from being on The List Of Things To Do to The List Of Things I’ve Already Done this past Monday morning, the beginning of a work week where I didn’t have to go to work. (School vacations were not my idea, so if you’re jealous I can’t help you. Do what I do). It all happened in less than half an hour. They are now part of the bulkhead the keeps the Creek at bay. Ha ha ha.

From there, with the help of my trustee sidekick, who was mostly very helpful for helping me get things done (and at one point was very helpful for taking a three hour nap on the couch so I could get things done) the List Of Things I’ve Already Done grew rapidly over the course of the week. I’m picturing a long scroll of paper being read by a guy from the Middle Ages, but you’ll have to settle for a middle aged guy on a MacBook Air to tell you about them. After I dug up the junipers, we went over to see Dave, but he didn’t have any white dogwood trees. Dave being Dave, he was willing to order them for me, but despite his eye rolling, we decided instead to take a ride down to Dee’s Nursery in Oceanside, which is a phenomenal place, and phenomenally expensive. But as Dave points out about Nurseries, “they don’t sell you ice in the winter.” And sure enough there were two little four-foot high white dogwoods, in bloom, waiting right there for me. Tommy Dee was happy to see me. Why on earth wouldn’t he be? I’m a guy who has 18 trees growing on a 60 x 105 plot of land and he’s seen plenty of that action. I’m a guy who’ll pay $129 each for two little trees, which I’m sure Tommy makes a nice profit on, but God bless him. He’s a good guy, and he knew I’d be coming for the white dogwoods.

DSCN6278 — New white dogwood in the front yard, with the trunk of the old one looking on sadly. In the background you can see my neighbors house where there’s a beware of dog sign that was posted by the previous owner. The current dog is a miniature greyhound. That sign is the staring point of a very long blog post that won’t be on The List Of Things I’ve Already Done until August or so.

After we found the camera that The Dude put down in the shed he wasn’t supposed to go into, Duffy’s Creek’s two new white dogwood trees slid right into the back of Lou The Blue Subaru Outback, along with a bag of Plant Tone for the blueberries, who had a terrible year last year. On the way home, we stopped at Modell’s and got The Dude a pair of sneakers. His first pair of Adidas as a matter of fact, which I’ve been wearing exclusively for 25 years because I thought Mose Allison looked cool in them. We had Nathan’s hot dogs and french fries for lunch at the new “Little Nathan’s” that replaced the legendary Nathan’s on Long Beach Road. (They did a nice job adapting. I’m impressed). We went home and planted two new trees, which perhaps he will cut down with his own son someday.

DSCN6281 — If you say you wouldn’t touch something with a ten-foot pole, you can envision this pole, which is ten feet off the ground and supports the Duffy’s Creek Acu Rite Weather Station. The Dude had the brilliant idea of marrying two six-foot long 4×4’s together. They’re sunk two feet into the ground with quickrete and gravel. I don’t know if it’s hurricane proof and I sure don’t want to find out.

Over the course of the rest of the week, we went back to Dee’s and bought $300 of organic garden soil (Bumper Crop, ask for it by name). I got the last of those bags of Bumper Crop down in the Rose Garden at 5:30 Saturday afternooon and I don’t want to see another bag of dirt until next April. We also went to Five Star Lumber and Hardware and bought two six foot poles, which The Dude married together using eight metal brackets, 32 screws and his trustee Black and Decker cordless drill. We mounted the Acu Rite Weather Station to the top of the pole and sunk it into two feet of gravel and Quickrete. Why? Because it was mounted on the railing of the garage roof and the wind gauge was being blocked by the house next door, which I couldn’t move. So moving it to a pole in the backyard went on The List Of Things To Do for four months, until Wednesday, when it officially joined The List Of Things I’ve Already Done. Of course, the wind hasn’t blown more than ten miles an hour since I moved it, so I’m not sure if it works any better yet.

While we were at Five Star, we also bought the supplies to paint the railing on the garage roof, which has been on The List Of Things To Do for at least seven years, but moved up a few notches once we had the roof and siding replaced and realized how crappy the railing looked unpainted. Weather permitting, that should be on The List Of Things I’ve Already Done by the end of May. We also have to replace the cellar door, which also now stands out like a bad actor now that the siding is new. There’s a company on Long Island called Man Products, which cracks me up, and which sells metal cellar doors. I insisted on a wood cellar door last time because I thought the rain on the metal cellar door right outside my bedroom window would interrupt my sleep. When the wooden door fell apart after five years, I decided to be less fussy, but I realized upon inspection that I would have to first fix the big crack in the foundation under the cellar door before I actually contact Man Products about replacing the door itself. It will stay on The List Of Things To Do for awhile longer, and just as well, ’cause I’m a little intimidated by Man Products.

Rounding out the list of Things I’ve Already Done that I did this week: The Dude wanted his own vegetable garden, so while he took a three hour nap on the couch Thursday afternoon after staying up all night the night before, I made him one. With broccoli, romaine lettuce, carrots and sugar snap peas ready to climb the trellis. Here it is:

DSCN6274 — The Dude’s new vegetable garden and the new backyard white dogwood. (Note sign. I love that child) The antique fence from the Reising Farmhouse is going in the mess behind the dogwood.

I’m also proud that I set up two nice outdoor fountains this week including a little display on the patio with white jasmine and white petunias that Trisha has already dubbed, “The Zen Garden”. And of course I went back to see my friend Dave and bought a bunch of marigolds and petunias and two new Bluecrop blueberry bushes, so I can walk around in the yard in the summer smoking cigarettes and picking blueberries, thus getting my carcinogens and antioxidants at the same time. Plus I bought some lantana at Dee’s to put in planters on the patio, ’cause God knows we don’t have enough flowers. And I walked about 15 miles with Mookie over the course of the week. (We’re at 128.9 miles for the year. We’re shooting for 500. So we can sing the song).

13103478_10209249738705720_6527358972129513553_n — Mookie enjoying the gentle flowing water sounds in the newly-created Zen Garden @ Duffy’s Creek

On Wednesday afternoon, after we installed the ten-foot poll, we visited the nice guy who lives in the former Reising Farmhouse over on Hungry Harbor Road regarding a ten-foot panel of black cast iron fence with fleur-de-li finials that’s been sitting in his backyard next to Robert W. Carbonaro School for quite possibly my entire lifetime. The guy’s in-laws owned the house before him, which was built in 1920 and surrounded by a potato farm before the Reising’s sold the land to build Carbonaro School (formerly Harbor Road, until I was in 2nd grade and a guy named Carbonaro died) and Valley Stream South High School, which never did me any good and now I have to send my son there. My father-in-law, the great Jack McCloskey, was the second generation of a nursery business in Queens, and he remembered buying lime in the 1930’s or 40’s out of the big barn in the backyard of the Reising Farmhouse, which is still there. The rest of the land was sold to one Mr. Gibson, who built a whole lot of little Cape Cods here in 1950, one of which my parents bought.

I had my eye on the fence for about three or four years because I had just the place for it, where the bradford pear tree took down a piece of our fence during Hurricane Sandy. I’m pretty sure the fence used to be around the farmhouse property when I was a little feller, so as well as looking cool in the space I envisioned it, I’d have a little bit of the history of South Valley Stream right here in our backyard. You gotta like that. It was on the List Of Things To Do to see if the guy who lived in the house would either give me the fence or sell it to me. About six months ago, while out rambling with Mookie, I saw the guy outside, introduced myself, and found out that he had bought the house from his in-laws, who still own an antique store on Rockaway Avenue, and most of the stuff in the barn was antiques. When I finally got around to seeing him again this week, he told me that he wanted $150 for the fence. I got him down to $125. I tried to get him to $100 by saying the fence was just going to sit there until I bought it. He patiently explained to me that this was the whole point of antiques. They get older. So I’m going to accept his offer, but only if he lets us peak inside the barn.

The only problem is, the fence is very, very heavy. But yet again, the solution is that The Dude is a genius and saves things because he might need them later. Last year, he scavenged a sliding closet door from his friends two doors away who are renovating their house. When I threw out a desk before Christmas, he scavenged the casters. I’ve been meaning to throw both of these things out when he wasn’t looking, but I’m glad I didn’t, as we now have the materials for making a giant rolling pallet, which we can use to roll the fence from the Reising farmhouse to the Duffy’s Creek Tenant Farm. It’s on The List Of Things To Do right now. God willing, it will be on The List Of Things I’ve Already Done by this time next week.

Tomorrow, I turn 53 years old. The List Of Things I’ve Already Done is enough to get me right to sleep most nights. Of course, if Trisha hadn’t been nice enough to marry me, I would have been an abject failure. But she did, and we’ve built a nice little life for ourselves. We have a nice long List Of Things We’ve Already Done. Then again, we’ve never been to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. We’d both like to see San Francisco. We’d also like the Dude to see Ireland and love it like we did, which he will. Trisha wants nothing to do with the fact that I’d like to buy a kayak or a canoe and annoy the idiots that run Hempstead Town and Nassau County into opening up the flood gate that holds Duffy’s Creek back from the waterways that lead out to Jamaica Bay and building a boat launch along the public path on the Left Bank. I think that would be cool. All that taken into consideration, I also want to spend as much time with Mookie Dog as possible, because he’s going to be five this week, and dogs are designed to break your heart someday. And he doesn’t like boats. Trisha doesn’t like both either and I want to spend as much time as possible with her, too.

In the next ten years or so, maybe twenty, we both have to work like hell to help a brilliant but delicate young psyche find his way from 12 years old to adulthood, complete with all the disappointments and heartbreak, triumphs and perseverance that it will surely involve. I think if I can make it to retirement, I might have a book or two in me, but If I don’t quit smoking at some point I’m plain fucked, and right now it ain’t looking good. That’s the subject for yet another blog post.

Speaking of which, It’s been four months since I’ve published a blog post. I have three that are sitting in draft stage. One is about my history as a passionate follower of the New York Mets. One is about the evolution of my relationship with food. Another is about my musical heroes. And since The Mets, food and music account for about 55 to 60% of my available brain space, there’s a lot to write. And I have to get up and go to work in seven hours. So those creative writing endeavors will have to sit around in the waiting room flipping through magazines while they are on the List Of Things To Do. This one? This one is now officially on The List Of Things I’ve Already Done.

September 1, 2015September 1, 2015

There’s Nothing Wrong Here: Our Annual Day at Splish Splash

Sometimes we’re a little bit arrogant here at Duffy’s Creek regarding how we spend our free time vs. how other people spend their free time. It’s a really obnoxious and pointless way to be and we’re trying to get over it. While we can’t fathom why anybody would go near any shopping mall unless they had to, or why anybody would want to go to a casino, or on a cruise ship, or to the state of Florida, or spend one minute watching 95% of the movies and TV shows that get thrown at us, the fact is you’ve got to live and let live. As I’m writing this, I’m watching grown men in matching pajamas playing with balls and bats. Who’s to say what’s a waste of time?

I guess for us it’s mostly about avoiding the crowd. We feel so packed in just living on Long Island that the idea of subjecting ourselves to a large crowd of people (that isn’t chanting “Let’s Go Mets!” or staring at the ocean) is just not something that seems like fun.

And then there’s Splish Splash.

If you’re not familiar with it, Splish Splash is a 95-acre water park at the end of the Long Island Expressway off the Calverton / Riverhead exit. It’s a good hour and a half from here in Sunday morning traffic. For four of the last five years, we have willingly made that trip once a summer to wade through crowds of half naked people, wait on really long lines for really fast rides and inhale chlorine fumes for five hours or so. And we’ll do it again next year. I think I can speak for Mrs. Duffy here when I say that for me to go to Great Adventure or Dorney Park would require kidnapping me and throwing me in the trunk of your car. And I guess if you did, I’d probably end up having fun if I survived the trip. But I won’t go on my own. Why? I’m not sure. Why do we love Splish Splash? I have my theories.

When they first opened in 1991, I remember hearing about it and thinking that it sounded like a fun place – if you weren’t a 28 year-old hipster doofus who had a seemingly cool job working at a magazine in the city and who hung out with people who never came out in the daylight. Those were days when my circumstances were very far from my true essence. I was trying to live a life that other people thought was cool, and deep down I wanted to be just another grinning idiot flying down a water slide. But I didn’t see myself going to Riverhead with a bunch of friends to ride the Giant Twister, ’cause I didn’t have a bunch of friends to go with, or with which to go. Many of my high school friends were already taking their own little kids to places like Splish Splash while I was hanging out in places with too much mascara. Then, in the fall of ’99, I met the woman I would marry, who likes the sun, and trees and birds and things like that. Our first two dates involved the Long Beach Boardwalk and flying a kite on the beach, so I knew I was on the right track. I’m happy to say that I left all vestiges of hipster city-guy life, and all the pallid people who go with it, back in the 20th Century. For the last 16 years, I’ve just been a happy doofus. So as soon as The Dude was old enough, I said the words to my wife that I had wanted to say to somebody for 12 years: “Hey! Let’s Go to Splish Splash!” And she liked everything about that idea.

The Dude was six the first year we went. The first thing I noticed when we got there is there were actually shade trees lining all the paths around the park, and lots of trees between the rides and pools. For some reason I hadn’t expected any trees at all. It’s really a beautiful place. It’s a park with a giant pool infrastructure built into it. The second thing I noticed is that no matter how big it gets, and what sort of insane rides they add, Splish Splash aims for a sort of “Land That Time Forgot” vibe, from the goofy parrot show to the dippin’ dots and carnival games, right down to the typefaces they use on the signs and the music soundtrack where everything is either from the 70’s or sounds like it is. I was instantly charmed. And I knew it was going to be crowded, so I prepared myself for that. And Lord it was crowded.

But I noticed something else right away. Many subsets in this huge crowd were big, extended families: Grandmas and aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters, all making a day of it, and all of whom required a ticket between $30 and $40 to get in. And many of these families, whatever color or flavor they were, didn’t look like the most prosperous members of the general population of Suffolk County or the surrounding area. To the uninitiated, “Out East” is the land of Hamptons Horse Shows and Writer and Artist Softball Games and Rock Star Mansions. But if you’re from Long Island, you know that there are a lot of pretty hardscrabble corners you can get to on the LIE. And you’ll find people with white, black or caramel mocha latte skin in these towns, but since the county at large is still pretty segregated, not necessarily in the same neighborhoods. But the fact is, there are people from parts of Suffolk like North Bellport and Central Islip and Mastic Beach who are all in the same economic boat, the one that sinks shortly after it misses a paycheck. It’s the same situation that millions of people in the outer boroughs of NYC find themselves in, and lots of them escape their cages for a day in the summertime to bring the whole family to Splish Splash. And for a family of ten people to spend over $500 to spend a day at a water park, when it’s entirely possible that the breadwinners of those families are making the minimum wage, is no small thing.

And I don’t think they’re being overcharged. I’m sure the owners of Splish Splash are making a nice healthy profit, but they deserve it, because they run a good business. It’s sparkling clean, fully-staffed, totally safe, and amazingly well-run for a place of it’s size. You get your money’s worth. It cost my little family of three $148, plus $24 for lunch, probably about $7 of gas and $3.50 for Daddy’s to go coffee on the way out. But we drove home with the feeling a euphoria that you get when you have a really, really fun day, and judging by the smiles that pass by you in waves as you walk through Splish Splash, I’m sure those big families had the time of their lives and made some great memories. (By the way, if there’s no line, that’s because the food is terrible. Stay away from the burgers on the boardwalk and go to Johnny Rockets Diner up by the Kahuna Bay Wave Pool. This is not a service article or a review, but you needed to know that).

But here’s the best part: If you factor out the recent “pay us more and cut the line” incentives that amusement parks are now pushing (the one at Splish Splash is called the “H2Go Pass” and costs between $40 and $60 – and I’ve never seen that many people using them) once you have bought that ticket and passed through that turnstile, you are an equal citizen of Splish Splash, with the same rights and privileges to jump around and woot and holler as every person you see. Even with the silly cabanas that they try to get you to rent, Splish Splash is a Democratic Socialist state. And like all Democratic Socialist States, it’s a great place to be a kid. Even a kid with sensory processing issues. And even if it takes a little while to warm up to it.

Our first stop in our first year was the Lazy River. First of all, holy crap what a great idea! You get in an inflatable tube and you float for twenty minutes, the water carries you forward and you end up where you started. You also have the option of going under periodic showers of water or steering around them. It is Trisha Duffy’s ultimate amusement park ride. She was all like this is the best thing ever. (She admires sloths). I don’t remember who rode the two-person tube with the Six-Year-Old Dude, but he loved it as well, as long as no one said the word “inflatable” (he was afraid of it at the time) and his head was never completely submerged in the water (which at the time would cause a meltdown as quick as you can say, “inflatable”). We spent the rest of the day doing what you can do at Splish Splash if you’re happily shackled to a six year-old boy. We watched him go down the nice easy water slides and run around around in the kids area, then we made our way over to the wave pool, where he got to wear a life preserver and was therefore in heaven for a good hour or more. We left already planning to come back the next year.

And we did. And we headed right for the Lazy River, which is, as I mentioned, my wife’s whole Splish Splash raison d’etre. And then the wheels came off. Trisha made a wrong move getting The Dude into the two-person raft and he was submerged over his head in two and a half feet of water for approximately three quarters of a second. And he threw a wicked meltdown and yelled and screamed and cried and carried on. I was already floating away at this point, and was ready to come back, but Trisha told me to keep on going. I told her that I’d get him when I came back and she would get her turn, but she was so pissed at the whole situation that she just didn’t want to. So she never got to go on the Lazy River that day. The Dude calmed down and we sat bored out of our minds at the kiddie area and the wave pool for the rest of the day.

The “Holland” story about acceptance of kids on the Spectrum has been around long enough that lots of people have heard it, but I’ll run you through it anyway in case you haven’t. It was written by a woman named Emily Perl Kingsley. I looked that up. The deacon at my church said once that he’d kill the next person who told it to him when he mentioned autism, and it is an oversimplification, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Here it is in a nutshell: When you find out you’re going to have a baby, it’s like you’re going on a fabulous trip to Italy. You’re going to see the Sistine Chapel, The Mona Lisa, The Tower, The Vatican, all that stuff. You’re stoked. You buy guide books and you try to pick up a little Italian. You get on the plane and six hours later the pilot announces that you’ll be landing in Holland instead, and you have to stay there. At first you don’t know what the hell to do, and you’re trying not to be pissed but you are. And then you have your breakthrough. Holland is really nice. There’s windmills and tulips and friendly helpful people. It’s a different place, but it’s a beautiful place just the same. You buy new guidebooks and learn some Dutch and you forget you ever wanted to go to Italy.

I’ve said it before and It’s time to say it again: The Dude may or may not be autistic. He’s been classified as such because school has been really difficult for him. And he exhibits some of the tendencies of an “Aspergian”: The monologue, the awkwardness, the sensory processing issues, the social cluelessness, the obsessions and compulsions.

We love him and wouldn’t change him. But we’re humans. There have been times, and the aborted Lazy River Trip of 2011 was one of those times, where we felt like saying fuck Holland, We hate it here. Be normal for Christ’s sake. Just stop.

We always come out of it, mostly because it’s an awful way to be, and we’re humans. But we also come out of it because The Dude keeps learning from his meltdowns. He’s still has them, but their frequency and duration have been decreasing every year. He keeps on getting better. He keeps on learning about himself and making adjustments. He keeps surprising us to the point where it’s hard to surprise us anymore, and it’s been the most beautiful experience of our life together to not only watch him grow up, but to watch him rise up.

And what have we done to help him? Everything we could think of, as much of it as possible. And If it worked, we kept doing it, and if it didn’t we stopped doing it and did something else. Our pediatrician, who may or may not know that he and I were in the same graduating class of Valley Stream South, ’cause neither one of us has ever mentioned it, suggested to us that kids like The Dude sometimes “grow out” of some of the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome, but what they’re really doing is learning how to ameliorate those symptoms, learning how to put them aside or rationalize them, or see the irrationality of them by developing a higher self that looks down. He ‘s starting to understand that his “condition” is a gift. A unique way of seeing the world and a unique set of skills to bring to that world. Teenage angst will come, and we’ll deal with it together. But right now, he’s cool with being a little weird. And this is what we’ve been trying to instill in The Dude for eleven and a half years. Look at yourself, then look around. Figure out what’s real and what’s in your head. Celebrate your strengths and fight like hell against your weaknesses.

For the last two years, The Dude has been a magnificent fish in the water, and we get to the pool and the beach as much as we can. We even keep it going with the indoor pool at Echo Park, where Daddy can sit in the sauna with the old Russian guys on cold winter afternoons. The boy who wouldn’t let his head get wet jumps off the diving board, swims out to the deep end, does summersaults underwater, even lets me throw him backwards in the Valley Stream Pool. He’s overcome his demons and is a much happier person for it.

And for the last three years at Splish Splash, we all floated solo on the Lazy River, then scared the hell out of the sloth enthusiast with a trip down the Mammoth River in the big raft. Then she watched as The Dude and I did a couple of trips down Dinosaur Falls. The whole dinosaur aspect of it is so Splish Splash Cheesy, which is why I love it. They put a couple of dinosaurs along the big twisting water slide because calling it “The Big Twisting Water Slide” didn’t have the mythology they were going for. Although the big slide in the center of the park, which we’re doing next year, is called “The Giant Twister”. Go figure.

This year we overcame the demons of Shotgun Falls. It’s a simple water slide that sends you down twenty feet in two seconds, whereupon you are catapulted through a waterfall and a geyser and dropped five feet off the slide into a ten-foot deep pool at about sixty miles an hour. Then you swim out. Nothing to it. I was trying to get him to do it last year and he was absolutely adamant that he was not going near it. And I didn’t push it. Because you don’t push it in Holland if you know what’s good for you. This year I suggested it again. And he was adamantly against it, until he decided to force himself to do it. I went down two times. May I suggest having the common sense my son has and holding your nose when you hit the water. Just as a heads up. He went down three times, right along with a bunch of young jock kids his age, who all looked like they’d been flying down this thing since they were three. They never suspected. And The Dude was on top of the world when he hit the bottom of that slide.

After the pretty bad lunch which we’ll improve on next year, we got to sit around the beloved Monsoon Lagoon for the better part of an hour. It’s impossible to really explain the Monsoon Lagoon so I will refer you to the accompanying picture, which of course I took without permission. (I didn’t tell them to post it on the Internet).

You will notice that there’s a big ship-like structure on the top of the Monsoon Lagoon. Every fifteen minutes or so, it dumps a large volume of water on whoever is lucky enough to be standing under it. The life guard on duty at the Monsoon Lagoon very well may have been working his last shift at Splish Splash before he left for SUNY Oneota, because he was letting The Dude and the other kids go down the slide backwards head first. Usually you don’t see a lot of civil disobedience in the Socialist Democratic Republic of Splish Splash. People are treated with equality and respect. It’s clean, you get to spend quality time with your family and there are opportunities to have fun, maybe take a risk or two. Not to mention plenty of bathrooms. Why would anybody act up? Give ’em a country like that and watch how well people would co-exist.

And that’s what Trisha and I were watching and thinking about as we relaxed at the Monsoon Lagoon, while our young maniac romped and played and created a good childhood memory for himself. We were watching a young couple, part of a larger extended family, introducing their very small baby girl to the wonders of a kiddie pool. The young daddy in particular made a striking impression on me. I didn’t get to be a daddy until I was forty. This kid was maybe twenty-two and he was enraptured by his beautiful baby daughter. His smile literally sparkled in the sunshine. He was so damn happy. They sat in the water together, and pretty soon the mommy sat down, and some older cousins sat down and they all sat there in the water watching this little girl explore this wonderful place that they had taken her. In her world and in our son’s world, this place is perfect. There’s nothing wrong here.

And outside the gates of The Socialist Democratic Republic of Splish Splash, buffoons in suits spewed more hate to capitalize on the lowest common denominator in people’s souls. They talked about building walls and rounding people up, or tracking them like Fed Ex packages. And people whose jobs suck and are broke all the time start to believe that the problem is immigration, when the real problem is the greedy bloodsuckers who bankroll the buffoons in the suits.

I am a second-generation American. My paternal grandparents emigrated here from Ireland a hundred years ago. I’m sure they took some crap, but they came anyway, because this country was worth sacrifice, worth risks. And let’s say my guess is right, and that young daddy at Splish Splash is a first-generation American, like my father, who also had a little baby when he was twenty-two as a matter fact, and probably smiled just as brightly. Or maybe this young man and others in his family snuck in to this country, and his daughter is the first-generation American.

Well if that’s the case, young feller, as far as I’m concerned, you’re doing it right.

It’s not your fault that the laws regarding your legal status have been outdated for years because no group of politicians has had the will or power or cajones to do anything about it. And if they call your little daughter an “anchor baby” or the next awful thing they think of, don’t worry about it. All their talk about immigration is nothing but coded racism, and anyone who thinks America was better when it was whiter better start swimmin’ or they’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’. Their outdated ideas will drown in a Lazy River of ignorance.

You and I will keep coming back here with our kids every summer, young feller, and we’ll watch them grow up. And better yet, we’ll watch them rise up.

Share this:

Share this: