We're All Adults Here

[So...big pause...I'm working on a large-thought post...hope to finish it later this week. Not that it will be especially profound, those posts are just a lot more time consuming.]

My brother, Isaac, has come to visit today.

He's going to community college next year. He keeps asking me what I think of that, and I keep saying "whatever makes you happy man." It kills me a little that he's talking about considering going to community college for English. If you're going to piss away four years of your life on a useless degree at least do it in a pretty location with some good drinking pals...get the full experience. God knows Mom would spring for it.

"He's not ready to go so far afield." Mom says.

Far afield? The school in question is right next to my high school...and not more than an exit from the middle school he attended at the time. He went that far every morning then...why not now?

"Well, I'm going to take Mom's advice," he says.

Ugh.

Its several hours later now, he's standing in my kitchen. Gilby is wandering around making dinner. We have come to a truce in some sense, I think everybody has calmed down since his move-in and found a little common ground. I'm cooking a vat of plain pasta for my brother, who is strolling around the kitchen venting his excitement by fluttering his arms and hands as he walks, grinning to himself.

"You want some sauce for your pasta?" Gilby asks him.

I find myself answering on my brother's behalf before he does, "No, he doesn't like that, he likes it plain."

"Maybe...some pasta sauce from a jar then if he doesn't like mine?"

"No, he eats things plain, he's like Hannalore."

Gilby grins a little, "There are more people like Hannalore?"

"Yup."

We share a few minutes of comfortable silence as the grease bubbles on the stove and my brother paces. I can't help but compare my brother and Gilby. Gilby may be immature and stupid but I still think of him as my peer in some sense, which is probably why I give him such a rough time on all his flaws.

"When's your birthday Gilby?"

Gilby looks up from a pan of hot greese and steak bits to tell me.

"Huh," I said, "Hey Isaac, you're twins with Gilby, what do you think of that?"

Gilby smiled, "Yeah, but not the same year."

"Guess again."

Isaac is pretty excited by this. "What time of day?" he asks. Gilby doesn't know, and this frustrates Isaac. I drain his pasta and begin serving him a portion.

"I can do it myself," Isaac informs me and takes the tongs and plate for himself.

Oh...yes...of course. I stutter mentally. I can't treat him like this, after all, would I ever serve Gilby his pasta? I'd tell him to get his lazy ass up to the stove and do it himself.

I watch Isaac, quietly marveling how much his coordination has improved. He use to be unable to throw and catch a ball. A physical therapist would throw and catch with him for hours. First she would roll a ball to him on the ground which he would capture and return. It was ages before he could catch it in the air himself. He found it infuriating. My parents would bribe him with candy and anything his heart desired to get him to keep trying. I remember running in front of him and catching the ball instead, hoping to get the same amount of praise. It didn't quite work like that.

I've never regarded my brother as disabled. I have, since a very young age, always known he was different, but it had been ages since I had compared him to anybody. I avoid it normally, try to take him as he comes.

I find that he is older than the high school kids I coach, and yet requires more care and supervision. I find that my middle school sister is beginning to overtake him in many ways, and that it is growing far easier to bond to her than to him.

You can't treat him like a normal person. If a normal person talked to me with the same ignorant narrow-minded black-and-white view of the world I wouldn't hang out with them. Depending on my mood I'd probably also tell that person off too. Personal beliefs aside, its pretty difficult to hold conversations with somebody who has, medically speaking, pretty much no sense of subtlety.

Yet, to not take my brother's words and thoughts seriously, to shrug it off as simply as an artifact of a medical condition, is to not take him seriously as a peer who requires my respect as a fellow human being. He can sense when I do this, and it infuriates him. After all, what right do I have to treat somebody only three years younger than myself as a child?

I'm almost positive both of us have expressed at some point in our lives, although never directly to each other, that we wish he simply needed a wheelchair instead. It would be so much easier on so many levels.

I'm telling Gilby and Isaac the story of the bar fight in the pancake house by this point.

"So we're in this pancake place...nice middle aged lady is our waitress...kinda heavset...wears a red checkered apron, big smile, calls you dear, asks you if you want gravy on your gravy..."

"Gravy on your gravy?" Isaac asks. "What about your food?"

"Its..." I pause, "you know the sort of place I mean. The place where everything comes with gravy."

"Ice cream?"

"Well...uh...not everything."

"She's evoking an archetype," Gilby said. He paused for a second. "How do you prounounce that?"

"Ar-keh-type," I responded.

My brother grinned. We were now discussing true and false statements, which is a favourite topic of his, "Yup! That's right!"

I nodded and continued my story, "So, there we are...and one of my friends...this kid is probably the whitest guy I know..."

Gilby grins and nods his head to my brother, not putting down his food, "Whiter than him?"

"I'm actually really pleased with my tan this summer," Isaac chirps excidedly.

Gilby starts cracking up.

"That's not quite what I meant," I said, looking at my food.

Isaac is puzzled, "What then?"

I put a chunk of meat in my mouth to chew to buy myself some time. We can make jokes at our own expense...I mean...we're all adults here...right?

Gilby, for once in his life, seems to be catching on. "Its another archetype."

We finished our meal and cleared the plates. My brother is thrilled. I can tell this meant a lot to him, and that he had a really good time. I walk him downstairs and let him out, then come back upstairs to help Gilby clear.

"Hey, thanks for..."

Gilby cuts me off with a laugh, "No, thank you for not being like your brother."

I feel like a total asshole but I laugh anyway. It definately is a relief when people acknowledge that we're not alike.

"Your brother has white-person syndrome...doesn't he?"

"What?"

"He's Asperger's."

I start cracking up again. It isn't even that funny, I'm just massively relieved.

"He's gone right?" Magpie pokes his head out the door of his room.

"Yeah," I said.

Magpie shakes his head, "You two are so mean."

"Aww come on," Gilby smiles, "We're all adults here..."

Que Sera Sera

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera, sera

I hadn't heard that song in so long I couldn't even remember where I knew it. The Spanish made me at first think it was from Spanish class in high school. I remember Mr R (God, he was so nice to me, and I can't even remember his name. Apologies Mr. R.) saying it from time to time and me privately rolling my eyes. I was always more of the philosophy that I'll make whatever I need to happen happen, that just sitting back and taking life as it came was for people who didn't know how to take control of things and get things done.

Come on, I'd be pretty hard pressed to believe that any of us aren't idiots now, let alone when we were in high school.

Anyway...it still didn't fit. I can remember most of the songs we sang in high school (I have an odd habit of remembering anything which rhymes..."but look at our brother the youngest one / my arm's still a wing cause my shirt wasn't done" from our class play in first grade. If only the translation of kinematic constraints into linear algebra rhymed.)

Anyway, it wasn't from high school.

When I was five my brother Isaac was two. At that time my parents and many doctors were concerned he would never be well enough to attend normal school. He would cry for hours if he heard an ambulance or a fire truck. His motor skills were poor and he was developing slowly. I had no idea. Mommy and Daddy as they were then, had told me before he was born that new babies required a lot of patience and would not be like "the big kids." To be honest, it wasn't until we were both a lot older that I realized there was anything different about my brother at all. I thought all babies were just like him.

What I did know though was that Mom and Dad just didn't have time for the both of us. My parents had planned for enough time to take care of two normal children but my brother's needs were vast and pressing.

Even very simple tasks had been made very complicated between my brother's extreme sensitivity and the well-meant advice of doctors. My mother would lay my brother down for a nap, roll him over like the doctors said to, and he'd wake up, crying. Calming my hysterical brother was a reasonable timesink, and when he finally fell asleep my mom would roll him over as instructed and the system would start again. This process would continue for hours.

Most of my memories from that age in my home are of sitting on the couch at the foot of the stairs and waiting for Mom to come back downstairs so I could use paints or do whatever it was that I wasn't permitted to do without adult supervision.

Eventually my parents decided to start sending me to my maternal Grandma's house. I haven't any idea how often it was, time at that age worked something like this.

1) how long until christmas
2) how long until my birthday

It was probably a few days a week.

Anyway, Grandma was pretty nice to me. I ate a lot of Spaghetti-O's and I learned about how microwaves heat things non-uniformly. I used a small object like an artist's pallet to measure spaghetti...and then would just throw more in the pot anyway because I thought it was never enough. I drank juice out of plastic cups with animals on them that came off the side a little to form the handles.

Grandma brought me along shopping and sometimes asked me what I thought when she needed to choose between two objects. Green was my favourite color at that time. By the time I was in grade school the majority of Grandma's interior decorations were green. She still drives a toothpaste green Toyota.

Every night Grandma would sing to me before I went to sleep. They were old and familiar songs to her, I know "how much is that doggy in the window" was actually a pop hit when she was young, but these are songs which have been mostly forgotten with time. They were certainly novel to me.

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother "what will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?"
My mother answered me

Que sera sera
Whatever will be will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera sera

When I grew up, and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart "what lies ahead?
Will we have sunshine? Will we have rainbows?"
My sweetheart turned and said

Que sera sera
Whatever will be will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera sera

Now I have children of my own
They ask me "mother, what will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?"
I answer tenderly

Que sera sera
Whatever will be will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera sera

Really, its not a bad philosophy for life.