Like a Light Has Gone Out of the World

Last week my husband called my attention to a local news item. “An old friend of yours has died. Not a friend, someone you used to work with.” 

“Who?” I asked of course, then looked where he was pointing. It wasn’t really a friend or coworker, exactly, it was the former medical director of the children’s medical facility where I had worked for 36 years, the person after whom the place is now named. He was 91 years old, so his death wasn’t a surprise, but I was sad nonetheless.

Until his retirement 26 years ago, Dr. M had devoted half a day a week to what was then called “brace clinic” at our facility, monitoring the progress of children with cerebral palsy, fitting them with the long leg braces that were then the standard of care, recommending surgery if needed and often doing the surgery for free if the parents couldn’t afford to pay. As the then president of our board pointed out at the ceremony marking the renaming of the center in his honor, that half day a week, that could have been used to serve paying patients, represented a tithe of the doctor’s income. Before he retired, Dr. M lined up replacement orthopedists to volunteer their time, but it took two of them, each working one afternoon a month, to take his place. By then, the Center had applied to become a Medicaid provider and long leg braces were being phased out and replaced with more modern orthotics.

Despite the tithe of his working hours and the other donated services, Dr. M apparently did well for himself financially. His family has its own charitable foundation, which donated a good bit of the financing needed for expanding the center several years after Dr. M retired.

My husband accompanied me to the funeral home for the visitation. There was, as I expected, a long line of people waiting to sign the visitor’s book and speak to the family. While waiting, I whiled away the time chatting with E, one of my first clients there. “You need to start working with this child right away,” my boss told me after observing E at clinic, “He doesn’t talk at all, and he’s six.” E’s problem, it turned out, was that he was overwhelmed by Dr. M. As I learned once he started speech, the problem was not getting E to talk, it was getting him to shut up. We reminisced about Dr. M, E repeating an often made observation, “You never needed to ask if he was in the building. If he was there, you heard him.” 

“How old is your daughter now?” I asked. “Five” Almost as old as E when I first met him. “Are you still working as a DJ?”

“No, I’m building custom computers now.” Then he shared with me his desire to get on the board of directors of the center. I wish him well. I think it would be an excellent idea. 

I finally work my way up to where the family is and introduce myself. Dr. M had several sons and each one introduces himself to the guests and shakes hands. The oldest one, when he hears where he used to work, tells me that the Center is what his father had been proudest of. “He should be,” I replied, still not able to get used to using the past tense. 

All of us have an impact on the people around us. Most of us affect the world for the good, in some small way. Some people go above and beyond that. Their influence goes farther and wider, and when they pass, it’s like a light has gone out of the world.

Undecorating

The Christmas decorations are all down and boxed up, waiting to go back into the attic.  My living room looks bare without the enormous tree taking up the space in front of the back window. That came down Sunday, after I spent Saturday removing all the ornaments I could reach. John had to get up on the ladder to remove the top ones, and he had to take the tree apart. It is now boxed up and back in the closet for next year. This took some time and effort, and there was a bit of discussion in which John promised me I could hire someone to put the tree up and take it down next year. I think he meant it as more of a threat, or at least a Dire Warning, but I would be happy to hire someone who would not be in a position to criticize my choice in Christmas trees unless he wanted to get his butt fired, and a bad write-up on Angie’s list to boot. I’m just saying. 

The rest of the undecorating is pretty much my job, because I’m the one who has picked most of the trinkets, except for the ones we inherited from Eloise. It’s not hard, just time consuming and a little sad. The time consuming part is due to my having over 200 tree ornaments, some of which go in their own little boxes and some in the big plastic ornament storage boxes with dividers, and for some of them I cannot remember which is which. Then I have to figure out which crystal angel goes in which blue box, and which Hummel angel goes in which printed box, and which boxes go up in the attic and which stay down. I should make myself a list, but I would only lose the list.

The sad part is the solo cup ball. Years ago I worked with a little girl, C, who was severely physically disabled due to an infection in utero. The first Christmas I worked with her, her family gave me a Christmas present - a big ball made out of several dozen clear plastic drink cups with Christmas lights strung through each one. They’re called patio balls, and I had never seen one before, but her grandparents made them to sell, and giving them away actually cost them potential income. I thought it was the most hideous thing I had ever seen, but I brought it home carefully, and that night I hung it on the porch. John will put up lights on the porch sometimes, but he doesn’t like to, so I thought I’d at least have something lit out there. Then I went across the street to the mailbox.

When I turned around again I was startled. The light fixture that looked so - unusual - in the daylight glistened beautifully in the dark. I would never have believed it.

C’s story is a sad one. After a few years, she had a bad seizure and fell into a coma. Eventually her parents had to make the hard decision whether to continue extraordinary life-extending measures or to let her go. Fortunately, they were supported by their church in their decision.

I went to C’s funeral, feeling angry. I watched her two brothers running around playing, and I could picture C as she should have been. When the pastor got up to speak, I folded my arms and thought, “This had better be good.”

The pastor read the verse from Matthew 19, verse 14: Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." He spoke about how much C’s brief life had meant to him, and how he had learned from her. My anger slipped away. I don’t know how her parents felt, but I think if it had been me, and if I found anything at all comforting, it would not be words about how God needed another angel in Heaven, but a reassurance that my loved one’s life, brief as it may have been, had an impact on people here.

C would be something like 20 years old by now, if she had lived. My patio ball, carefully treasured, has survived and hangs on my porch every year, a beautiful light that, like C, shines briefly from an unprepossessing exterior, before it goes away.

It's Not a Bad Little Coffee Mug, Really

I know I am supposed to be writing accounts of my travels, but I have been busy since I got home. Earlier this week, for instance, I attended a conference of the Retired State Employees Association, as a guest of my husband, who is a retired state employee. The conference was held here in town, but they did keep us busy, not to mention well fed. Besides, there were door prizes.

Monday afternoon we started off by attending a workshop on genealogy. I was not aware of this, but our parish public library system has a genealogy department, with  free access to their ancestors.com subscription, classes, and even librarians to assist you in your research. Alas, this would not be of too much help to me, because my grandparents immigrated here from Italy, and the ancestors.com data bases do not reach that far. Not only that, but when my dad did try to trace some of the relatives when he was in Italy during WWII, he discovered that several of them had migrated to Argentina. Still, it might be fun to track down just when my various grandparents arrived, and maybe to see if I could learn more about my Grandma D’s mysterious first husband.

After a buffet style jambalaya dinner, we played bingo. It is impossible to have a gathering in southeast Louisiana without jambalaya and bingo. They’re the unmentioned eight and ninth sacraments. The bingo games were funny. Each game had five winners. The first person to reach bingo in each game got a ten dollar  Walmart gift certificate. Then we kept playing without clearing the boards until there were four more winners (more in case of ties), who each got RSEA coffee mugs. Once five people had won, we started a new game. I won a mug. It’s not a bad little coffee mug, really.

Tuesday, we had our keynote speaker, former Louisiana governor and recent Federal parolee Edwin Edwards. You have no idea how much I enjoy writing lines like that. He might seem like an odd choice as keynote speaker, but it was under Governor Edwards that the Louisiana state constitution was rewritten in the 1970’s and included strong protections for the job rights of state employees, much to the chagrin of our latest governor. Whatever you think of Edwards as a person, he is a charming and humorous speaker. He began by talking about his first federal job, carrying water to workers on a government project for nine cents an hour. Many years later, he got his second Federal job as a prison librarian, for 22 cents an hour, so that was a bit of a pay raise there. 

John and I did well during the door prizes. He won a gift certificate for a local restaurant and I won an autumn wreath.

I’m glad the conference didn’t last longer than it did. All our meals were included, in addition to the jambalaya dinner: a continental breakfast, a full plate lunch with salad and dessert, full dinner at a dinner dance, and a plate breakfast the next morning. I’m surprised I didn’t have to roll out the door.

But now that that’s over with, I’m back to my usual schedule of sloth and ease, and will, I promise, write up my adventures in England.

So One Afternoon

The recent back and forth over Chick-fil-A owner Dan Cathy donating heavily to anti-LGBT groups has led me think I may be the only person in the country who doesn’t like CfA’s chicken sandwiches. Actually, I don’t dislike them, I just don’t find them irresistible. So far as I know, I have only eaten there once, about 6 months ago when we got a coupon for the franchise nearest us. I honestly don’t even remember what the sandwich tasted like, other than, of course, it tasted like chicken. So boycotting CfA is not exactly a political act on my part, it’s my default mode, if anyone can be said to be boycotting a business she doesn’t frequent because she doesn’t need the product.

I know they also have waffle fries, but so does Back Yard Burgers, which is practically in my backyard, seeing as how it’s across the main street to my subdivision. Back Yard Burgers also has sweet potato fries, which I like much better.

For chicken, though, my husband and I prefer Popeye’s, which is also practically in my backyard, being two blocks from Back Yard Burgers. It's his favorite, but my favorite is Raising Cane’s.

That leads me to the actual point of this post, which is to tell a terrific story about Cane’s (as we call it around here).  

The children’s rehabilitation center where I worked before I retired does a lot of therapy groups in the summer, including what we called Functional Life Skills groups. The physical therapists, occupational therapists and speech language pathologists would plan our therapy around group activities in which children learned how to use a calendar, or make change, or cook meals, or other functional life skills. One year we had a group of children, many of whom used augmentative communication devices, who were working toward going out for a meal at a local restaurant. That meant that group activities involved selecting a place to go (taking turns, taking a vote, accepting majority rule), reading a menu and calculating how much the meal would cost, learning about currency (how many pennies make a nickel, how many nickels make a dime, etc) practicing how to order.  (In later years we had a group assemble and sell trail mix to raise money for their food.) We had vocabulary activities, gross motor games, fine motor games (a money lotto game for instance), and then finally, the big visit to Cane’s.

We went in the mid-afternoon. This being summer, most of the workers were late high school and early college age students. They were, in an overworked word, awesome. So were our kids, but we had been preparing them all summer for the big event. The Cane’s workers, on the other hand, probably didn’t have groups of largely non-verbal children with walkers and wheelchairs dropping in every day and ordering with posters and electronic devices*. Nonetheless, they were perfect. The Cane’s staff knew to talk to the children as they ordered, not the adults standing next to them, and they were friendly but not patronizing. They checked with us several times to make sure everything was all right, (of course, it was mid-afternoon and we were practically the only people there) and there again, they talked to the kids who were their customers, not just the adults in attendance.

Naturally we sent a glowing letter of thanks and praise the next day.

So even if Raising Cane’s did not have Cane’s sauce and the best lemonade and sweet tea anywhere, I would be a big Cane’s fan just because one summer afternoon,  they treated a marginalized group of people who were used to being ignored and patronized like the regular people they are.

And that’s what everyone really wants.

*OTOH, a lot of high schools in the area have community service requirements for their students, so maybe they did have some experience with special needs kids.

Safe Driving in Louisiana

The following is a story I wrote in 1986 or so for a short story contest run by Louisiana Life magazine. I didn't win anything. If I remember correctly, they chose 24 stories to run one each month for 2 years, but the magazine folded after 2 or 3 months. Since the story was written 25 years ago, there are some details that may be hard for people to relate to, but yes, people still had milkmen back then, Joy Browne had not been replaced by Dr. Laura on the radio, and Robin Leach had a television program called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Construction on the Interstate, alas, is with us always.

That was the name of the driver's manual I had to study  the first time I got a Louisiana license: Safe Driving in  Louisiana.  I thought it was named by somebody with a sense of  humor or either a basketball fan or possibly just somebody who had never been on I-10 at rush hour, but I passed my written test one point higher than my husband (now my ex-husband and I bet that was when the trouble began, with that test). I surrendered my New Jersey driver's license and joined the ranks of other Safe Drivers in Louisiana and if that makes you laugh, it should.

  

 Actually, having both family and friends scattered through at least six states I have had ample opportunity to notice that the two things everybody is convinced of are that (1) his state has the worst drivers in the country and (2) his state has the most crooked politicians in the country.  I mean there may be someplace (like preserved at the Smithsonian) a person who brags about how courteous the drivers of her state are or how  well governed the place is but I have never met this person and I don't expect to either unless it's as the result of a two car collision.  

What brings on these jaundiced thoughts is that I am once again stuck in traffic on the Interstate, the same Interstate they just spent four or five of the most productive years of my  life widening so that people would not get stuck in traffic on the Interstate.  If you live here in Baton Rouge you know what  I mean and if you don't you probably know what I mean anyway because the other thing no one ever says is how fast road construction projects are completed at home.  Of course, the nice thing about being stuck on the Interstate is that at least a deer is not going to attack my car, at least, not likely.  

 

Yes, I did say a deer and I know what you would be thinking if you saw me now, an ordinary middle-aged lady in an ordinary silver hatchback that there must be at least ten of within three miles of here, that I don't look like the kind of person odd things like that happen to but this did.  I was up on Highway 61 heading back from Wakefield on a job and not  expecting much in the way of trouble except the radio fading  out just as Joy Browne was getting ready to tell that woman with the two-timing husband what to do about it like it always does  although of course I knew what she was going to say, she was going to say "I know this is very painful for you but you can't change the past you just have to think about what you want out of this marriage for the future and be very specific about it", like she always does which is why I don't listen much to Joy Browne anymore but I did then and whenever I had to go up to  Wakefield WJBO would fade in and out like someone just learning  to play the accordion so that was the most trouble I was expecting.  

But I was on the Spillman road heading back to 61 when  this deer came running out of the woods and hurtled straight at  my car and of course I swerved to avoid him just as he leaped  to avoid me with the result that he landed right on the hood of my car and put a dent in it and I wound up in a ditch until two nice men in a pickup truck came by and pulled me out.  This was  not the car I have now but another one that I finally replaced with this one when the air-conditioner broke down in the hottest part of the summer which is the only time they ever do but it was time for a new car anyway what with the old one having 125,000 miles on it and the dent from the deer, and the air-conditioner would have taken more money to fix than I wanted to think about although of course so did the new car. I don't know what happened to the deer: he ran off somewhere and the two men couldn't find him.

Anyway, stuck here in traffic I don't expect another deer to come flying out of nowhere but the other drivers on the road worry me some and besides, I just want to get home.  Ever since I took this job as a representative for the PrettyGoods home decoration and gift supplies people I have just about lived in  this car and come the end of the day I've had enough of it.  If  you haven't heard of PrettyGoods you have probably heard of  something just like it: we pounce on some unsuspecting housewife or even working mom and convince her that she and her  buddies can have fun, do their Christmas shopping and beautify their homes simply by having a PrettyGoods party at her house with all of said buddies drooling over the merchandise and   whipping out their checkbooks eager to buy.  Of course I don't quite put it that way in talking to her because of course the PrettyGoods people have dreamed up some pretty little speeches  for us gift and purchase counselors (they really call us that,  they really do, gift and purchase counselors and the first time  I heard it I burst out laughing and it was almost the end of my career as a PrettyGoods gift and purchase counsellor before it had even begun, but I managed to convince the personnel lady I had asthma so that was all right.) Where was I? anyway, oh yes some pretty little speeches for us GPC's to memorize and they coach us on how to say them so it sounds like somebody just talking, almost.    

    

Stalking Miss Iowa

Abbey is the one in blue.

Every September for the past nine years, the small non-profit organization I work for has held a fundraiser breakfast. For the first seven years we had the usual run of motivational speakers, including one who was informally voted Worst Speaker Ever. Last year we had the good fortune of getting D.J. Gregory, author of  Walking with Friends, as our keynote speaker, and everyone was mesmerized. One of our board members noted, "I can listen to Dale Brown at practically any meeting I go to, but I don't get to hear speakers who have disabilities."


So this year my boss tried to get Temple Grandin, but that fell through. Instead we found Abbey Curran, Miss Iowa-USA 2008. Abbey is your ordinary, run-of-the-mill drop dead gorgeous beauty queen with cerebral palsy. When Abbey entered her first beauty pageant, one of her teachers tried to discourage her, saying, "Abbey, be realistic." As the parent of one of my little ones noted, "I'm surprised she would say something like that. Was she trying to get sued?"


In addition to being gorgeous, Abbey is a very funny speaker. She talked of growing up on a hog farm and how all her friends envied her. Abbey also talked about her first beauty pageant, and how worried she was that she would fall getting to the stage. She was proud to report that she didn't fall, but her dress did – right to her knees.


(I'm not sure whether to believe that story.)


I didn't exactly stalk Miss Iowa, but what with one of my co-workers taking official pictures, the news people taking pictures, and several of the organizers taking pictures, I had to squeeze in where I could to get a few blurry, badly lit shots. She didn't seem too upset.


Later that evening, my husband and I went out to dinner. At the next table I heard a woman saying, "I gave them a donation. They showed a video that really tugged at your heartstrings. And the speaker was from Iowa. She won a beauty pageant." Small world – she had been at our breakfast. On my way out I thanked her for her donation, hoping all the while I didn't still have hot wing sauce on my face.


I wonder about the Abbeys of the world. What is it that makes some people say, "I can do that" when everyone else is saying, "Be realistic"? Are people born with that kind of confidence and determination, or do they develop it as they grow? Just being gorgeous isn't enough to win you a beauty contest. You have to enter. You have to show up.


You have to be willing to risk falling on your face.

Seeds

Today I was working with D again and we were looking at an abbreviated, board book version of the book, The Carrot Seed.  While D showed his mastery of simple WH questions (yay!) by pointing as I asked, "Where is the carrot?" and "Where is the older brother?", I reflected, as I so often do, that three of the four characters in the book were unbelievably dumb. I understand the charm of the book, really I do. I love the illustrations. I love the indomitable spirit of the little boy, watering his carrot seed every day and pulling up the weeds, despite the naysayers. I used to have a vinyl record of the story that I played to my little students of long ago, back when we still had a record player, and I can still sing the tunes that went with some of the words. Heck, I bought the book when the record was no more.


But when I drop my willing suspension of disbelief, I find I can't understand the attitude of the parents at all. Okay, older brothers are born to say, "Nah, nah, it won't come up", but why should parents be so convinced that a seed won't grow? Grow is what seeds do. It's not as if the boy wrote to his favorite baseball player inviting him to dinner and lo and behold, there he is at the door.  It seems to me that people as stupid as the parents should not, unlike the carrot, be allowed to breed.


And I shared these thoughts with little D, a bad habit of mine when I know that my jaundiced comments are flying over a child's head and not likely to do any harm. Then I announced it was playtime.


I have been working for a long time to get D to say "I want truck" rather than just name the item he wants to play with. Despite the fact that he is now talking in sentences, short and ungrammatical as they may be, and despite a few successes, D just did not seem to get it.  So when I asked, "What do you want?" it was with the expectation of a long go-round to get those three words out of him, in order, in any kind of temporal proximity to each other.


And D said, as naturally as any other child, as if it had never been a problem, without any hesitation, "I want bus."


I think I get it now.

Oh, carrots grow from carrot seeds.

I planted one and grew it.

I watered it, I pulled the weeds.

Carrots grow from carrot seeds.

Famous in a Small Town

Paintings from last year

Another summer, another week of our annual summer art program for special needs kids. Last year at this time we were trying to sell our house and move out of state, so I didn’t expect to be doing this again. Our summer art program is fantastic for children, with or without special needs, not so good for 60 something, out of shape women with bad knees and bad arches and a severe need for an afternoon nap.  I like to call art camp the reason God invented Celebrex.

This year, the children got to do pottery, storytelling, painting, dance (called “movement”, like they weren’t moving the whole rest of the time) and collage. There were five groups of children so they rotated through the classes. I was with the second oldest group, which comprised two children in power wheelchairs, one with a walker, two children with autism, one with Down syndrome, one with an unspecified form of cognitive disability, two siblings, and two children of my co-workers.  Despite the wide range of special needs, they behaved exactly like any other group of  children that age: distracted by the construction going on outside, inclined to converse with their best friend while being given instructions, imaginative at using any art supplies as small weapons, stubborn about trying anything outside their comfort zone, and generally in need of those crowd control tactics beloved by generations of teachers everywhere. Compared to the younger groups, they were easy to handle, especially with the aid of several teen volunteers and one of the siblings, and for the most part understood the basics of the tasks and did an impressive job with them.

On our first day there, I noticed a reporter accompanied by a photographer being led from group to group. It started me thinking about the advantages of living in a small city. There are stories in our local paper every year about our art program, our annual canoe trip, and our two major fundraisers. These are not just small paragraphs in an “around town” section. These are full articles with bylines and pictures. I suspect that if we existed in Philadelphia or Atlanta, this would not be the case. As Miranda Lambert sang, everybody dies famous in a small town.

The reporter was back for our culminating event, the recital at the end where the children danced “The Ant and the Grasshopper” and displayed their work. By this time, I had forgotten the bad knees and bad arches, the spilled paint, the “swordfights” and got teary eyed when most of our group, who were playing dragonflies, remembered where to stand and when to flash their lights. By the time the ants carried off the dead grasshopper and took their bows, a process that took longer than the actual dance, I was convinced that it was the best production of  “The Ant and the Grasshopper” ever.

I can’t wait for the reviews.

Reindeer Games

Yesterday one of my coworkers gave all of us tree ornaments she made - reindeer made from wine corks. I usually love homemade tree ornaments, but not this one. It was well made. Obviously she had put a lot of care into it. I just didn't like it. Four wine corks glued together with plastic eyes and nose and pipe cleaner antlers and tail just look like a Kindergarten project to me.

Naturally I thanked her and brought it home safely (I thought) tucked into a gift bag with a gift one of my little kids gave me. When I got home, the reindeer was in three parts, the front leg and head having broken off in transit. So that should have been the end of the story. Just toss the three pieces in the trash. My coworker will not be visiting my house at Christmas, and even if she did, I had a handy and true explanation for the ornament's absence.

For some reason, I couldn't do it. The pieces had been hot glued together. I have a hot glue gun (somewhere), and could see where to glue them together to put them back. I dithered back and forth between fixing the ornament and tossing it out. It sat on the kitchen counter all night. By morning I had come to my senses and tossed the reindeer remains in the trash.

In the meantime, I've been reflecting on white lies and pretenses. Would it be a better or worse or just different world if we always told the truth about what we think about things? There are people who think it would be better. They have no hesitation about telling you that the ornament that you spent time and thought creating for them is not to their taste. I've noticed these people tend not to like it if you are honest back. So I'm not sure I want to see a world in which we don't say we're thrilled with the present, or that a friend's new haircut is becoming, or that our children's artwork is the cutest ever.

On the other hand, we all work at honing our listening skills to sort out the real from the insincere. One of my social worker coworkers is so obviously tactful in her dealings with me that if she says, "Susie's mom has some concerns she expressed to me", I automatically translate that into "Susie's mom showed up in my office with a lawyer and a gun". I think most people would know not to give me 6 more assorted wine cork reindeer ornaments after hearing me say, "I wonder where people get those ideas. I would never in a million years have thought to make something like that." Unfortunately, some people are no good at reading the subtle signs. It would be easier to negotiate through a world in which people say what they really think, but it would be harsher. I've seen that world on message boards I frequent, and I don't want to live there.

But occasionally, especially at Christmas, I might want to visit.

Little Things

Little things have been weighing me down lately. Besides the house not selling, or even showing, the death of my cat, the illness of my other cat, my increased gastritis, and the general economic miasma, a group of my coworkers took over the office next to mine and demanded that my file cabinet had to go, after I thought we had worked out a deal for it to stay. I wouldn't be so pissy about the file cabinet if there weren't another equally suitable room available for their project, with the one drawback being that a volunteer who uses that room one hour a month has final say over what can go in there. It bothers me that it's easier to inconvenience me 36 hours a week than to inconvenience her one hour a month. The file cabinet is now perched awkwardly in my office behind a toy kitchen set-up and I am making my peace with it, because snarling at a file cabinet 36 hours a week is no recipe for mental health.

And besides, little D has come up with his own way of cheering me up. As I wrote in a previous post, we have been working forever (or at least 8 months) on getting him to say "I want truck" and getting either "I want" or "truck", but not all three words together. Yesterday, he looked at me, said "Mom" (his one word for all adult females), "I want to play truck." He smiled triumphantly. I smiled ecstatically. He got to abandon whatever suitably pedagogical activity I had planned for him and go play trucks. I got to enjoy one of the little things.

Giggle, Giggle, Chortle, Chortle, Snort, Snort

Lying on the floor to take a picture of the dancer's feet sounded like a better idea than it was.

Back in June, the place where I work held our annual summer art program for special needs children. They got to take classes in pottery, dance, painting, music, and multimedia, and on the final day, we held our big exhibition. The program is co-sponsored by the Junior League, and they work extremely hard on it.

This year, one of the Junior Leaguers took pictures. I don't know if she is a professional or just a dedicated amateur, but she had some very fancy looking camera equipment, which amazingly enough, kept working despite my constantly drooling over it. For 4 days, she took pictures of the child artists at work.

Friday, I brought my own point-and-click camera to take some pictures for my own use. My boss asked if I could take some pictures of the kids because our Junior League photographer hadn't brought her camera. Since the kids were getting their faces painted for the big performance, I took pictures of them all in their warpaint. Alas, I can't post them, for privacy reasons, but the pictures came out seriously cute, especially since I have lost my fear of getting down on my creaky knees to catch them at eye level. I made up a CD of the faces pictures and a few others I thought she'd like for my boss.

The week after the program ended, I got an emergency request from the coworker who runs the program. She needed four pictures to include with a report she was preparing for a funding agency. The CD of pictures she got from the real photographer had something wrong with it, and she couldn't use any of the pictures on it. Could she use mine? Of course, I said yes. And began the giggling, chortling, and snorting reported above.

I don't know if they ever got a good copy of the "real" pictures. I'm certainly enjoying mine.

I'm Famous, Well, Sort Of

In the fall of 2007, we went to the Houston Museum of Natural History to see the Lucy exhibit. (Or as my husband put it, "Why are we going to see old bones?") Since we were there anyway, we naturally toured the rest of the museum exhibits, including the one pictured above, which is labeled as the world's largest seashell. I took the picture because I loved the way the white and blue looked together, and when I posted the picture to my web hosting site, I of course titled it "World's Largest Seashell". Now if you do a Google image search for "world's largest seashell" or any of several variations thereof, the first picture you see is mine.

It's my one and only claim to fame, because I lead an otherwise boring life. What usually happens in my life is more like this:

I work with young children who just can't get the hang of speaking correctly. Some of them have a condition called childhood apraxia of speech, which simply put means that for them saying the simplest sentence, like "I want cookie", is as difficult as reading Fox in Socks while mildly drunk is for the rest of us. Remediation consists largely of trying to make constant repetition seem remotely interesting to the childish intellect.

That means I spend my day holding conversations like the following:

D: car?

Me: Say, "I want car."

D: "ahwan"

Me: I want what?

D: Car!

Me: "I want car."

D: Here (hands me car)

D had trouble learning the pronouns "I" and "you", so even getting "ahwan" (I want) was pretty cool, and often got him the car. One day, the ladder came off the fire engine (fah en). "Don't worry", I reassured D. "I fix it."

"You fix it?"

My jaw hit the table. Not only three whole words, subject-verb-object, but he used the right pronoun. I went over to my desk to write it down before I forgot.

A little voice drifts over from the play table. "You writing?"

"Yeah, I writing so I don't forget." I crying, actually. I get emotional over little things.

Little things like having the number one hit when you Google "world's largest seashell". It's my one and only claim to fame.

ETA: Another of my adventures with little D can be found at my post Seeds.