We Interrupt This Column …

Today’s column was almost called on account of “Yeah!” 

The shouts of triumph – yes, plural – came from Missy. The source? A book full of Star Wars illustrations, every single one of which required her to wave me over so I could share the latest discovery. 

“Look!” 

A tough-looking Wookiee. Han Solo with a blaster. An alien with a baby face. (“Baby!”) Every few seconds brought a new image, a new cheer, a new requirement to get away from that keyboard and come SEE. 

“Yeah!!” 

If you know Missy, this won’t surprise you. Her physical and developmental disabilities can make many things challenging for her, but enthusiasm has never been one of them. When she’s in the mood, just about anything can get her supercharged: a classic car, a cool-looking pair of shoes, even an opportunity to wash the dishes.

“Yeah!!!” 

Now, this could be a column about how great that kind of joy over simple things is. It’s a good thing to remember and I’ve written that piece before. But this time, I want to flip the direction. 

You see, those moments don’t follow a schedule. Not one that fits neatly on a calendar alongside “take notes for half thought-out column” and other such things. It means interruptions. Backtracking. Maybe even frustration as you try to recover a lost bit of focus. 

But that doesn’t matter. 

When you’re a parent – or at least in the position of one – and you get summoned into the latest enthusiasm … you share it. Right then. Right there. Period.

To them, this is the most important thing in the world right now. And being invited to join that is a privilege.

OK, yes, obviously there are limits. Sometimes it’s good to learn to wait. Some dangerous enthusiasms need to be headed off. And yes, sometimes you legitimately can’t interrupt a task . (“I have to keep my eyes on the road right now, sweetie, but I’ll look when we get to this stop sign, ok?”) But by and large, the rule holds.

Don’t squash the joy. Don’t diminish the moment. Never teach the person you love that something else is more important than they are. 

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad rule of thumb in general. 

Missy’s in a quieter mode now, perusing a magazine as she watches the world through the bay window. But the next moment will come. And when it does, we’ll be there. 

After all, it’s a moment to share love. 

And that’s always something to shout about. 

“Yeah!!!!” 

Leaping Into the Season

Written Dec. 7, 2019

With one excited leap, Big Blake fulfilled his holiday duty of protecting us from plastic pines.

CRASH!!!

To be fair, it wasn’t intentional. Our 85-pound English Labrador is a dog of mighty power, mighty enthusiasm and mighty little brain. Like all good dogs, he wants to guard his family. And like all big dogs, he believes that he’s the size of a terrier.

And so, when Blake watched out the front window and saw a human coming near his house, his protective instincts kicked in while his spatial awareness dropped to zero. Especially his awareness of the freshly decorated Christmas tree within millimeters of him as he turned on a dime – OK, on a quarter – and charged for the front door.

Did I mention CRASH!!!? Yeah, I thought I did.

This year marked a new holiday record for Blake. We had bought and set up the new tree (pre-lit, to spare the family’s spinal columns) less than 24 hours before. It had had a peaceful and beautiful Silent Night to start the season before its ignominious toppling to the theme of Oy To The World, The Dog Has Come.

It had been a while, but we remembered the routine. Lift everything back into place. Check for damaged ornaments (few). Untangle branches and ornaments that had gotten twisted together (many). And then step back and check the picture.

The picture, it turned out, was hung a little crookedly. Like an eager child the day after Thanksgiving, our new tree had developed a Christmas list – it was leaning just a bit to one side.

Somewhere, somehow, Blake had put a bend in the pole. Not a huge one. Not an obvious one (except to my highly detail-aware wife, Heather). The tree’s beauty was still there, but if you knew where to look, you could see that it had been through an impact.

On reflection, that’s not a bad way to see many of us at this time of year.

Every year, we’re reminded that this is a season of joy. It’s in the songs and readings, the lights and decorations, the wishes that we pass along to each other. “Merry Christmas!” “Happy Holidays!” “Have a great New Year!”

And for a number of us, the joy feels muted. It lands softly, or not at all.

It might be a season of ghosts, where memories of Christmas Past make Christmas Present a little harder to bear.

It might be a struggling time, or an anxious one, or a darkness that crept in with the cold and the snow.

It might even be something that has no reason at all, just a gray place that needs to be acknowledged for a while in silence and healing.

And that’s OK.

This shouldn’t be a time of forced gaeity. It’s not about hitting someone over the head with a jingle-bell wreath and then blasting carols at them 24 hours a day, like a Christmas edition of “A Clockwork Orange.” This is a time for remembering that we’re part of a larger family; one with hopes, and needs, and yes, pain that needs to be seen and acknowledged. To be reached out to in love, not bulldozed or whitewashed.

And as we reach out to each other, as we meet each other where we are … sooner or later, we find the joy never really went away. It felt like it. It seemed a certainty that it could never return. But in time, in that gentle, quiet reaching  out, we find the joy reborn. Dented. Marked. Leaning to one side like an injured Christmas tree. But beautiful all the same.

It takes patience. But it’s one of the best gifts anyone can give.

May all of you find your joy this season, whether bright and exuberant or dented but enduring. May we welcome each other as we are and plant the seeds of what can be.

And if that welcome suddenly includes the impact of a loving but clumsy English Labrador, I am so, so sorry.

A Hairy Moment

There are masters of illusion and concealment in this world. Artists who can make anything from a handkerchief to the Statue of Liberty seem to vanish without a trace.

Toupee Man is not one of those masters.

Who is Toupee Man? The Spanish police haven’t released his name, but his genius is surely one-of-a-kind. After all, there can’t be that many individuals who have hit upon the mind-bending idea of smuggling 17 ounces of cocaine into a country by … well … hiding it under a toupee.

Needless to say, said hairpiece and its cargo were more than a little obvious. Which is something like saying that Elton John was just a bit unrestrained in the 1970s.

“There is no limit to the inventiveness of drug traffickers trying to mock controls,” the police wrote in a statement reprinted by Reuters, one of the many news agencies to report this.

Inventiveness. Yeah. We’ll go with that.

It’s easy to laugh. Heaven knows I did. But like a lot of life’s humor, part of the laugh comes from familiarity.

We’ve seen this before.

Oh, I don’t mean we’ve all witnessed awkward items being smuggled under unlikely formations of hair, unless anyone has had the opportunity to live next door to Marge Simpson. (D’oh!) But we know the routine of trying to conceal the undeniable.

We’ve seen the prominent figure who “walks back” an outrageous statement, trying to explain why what he or she said wasn’t really what you heard.

Or the celebrity at the center of a scandal who tries to deny, to evade, and then to excuse.

Or anyone, great or small, who finds themselves in the midst of something unpleasant and tries, for just a moment, to “make it not have happened.”

There are a million terms for it. But it’s an urge as old as humanity. Hide the bad stuff. Make it appear normal. Even when it’s as obvious as trying to slip an Uzi under a baseball cap.

From the tale of Cain to modern playgrounds and politics, it’s always born of fear. And the answer is the same one that every kindergarten teacher knows, and that ever PR firm today teaches for crisis control.

Don’t hide.

Acknowledge the mistake. Admit the harm that was done.

Apologize. Sincerely.

And then make it clear how things will change going forward.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences. There almost certainly will be. After all, if it was harmless, there wouldn’t have been an urge to hide in the first place. Trust gets weakened. Customers leave. Policies can founder and elections be lost.

But invariably, owning your actions causes less damage than trying to bury them. Ask Mr. Nixon sometime.

The last step, of course, is the most important of all – how will things change? That’s where transformation can occur, if we let it. C.S. Lewis once noted that if you’re on the wrong road, the fastest way forward is to first turn back.

No wigs. No disguises. Just coming clean and taking the first step to do something different.

We know this. It’s why we get so angry when someone we know – famous or otherwise – refuses to learn, refuses to change, refuses to acknowledge that they have anything to change. And why we get so embarrassed when we catch ourselves, from time to time.

And it’s what makes it so wonderful when the change truly comes.

It starts with self-recognition. With empathy. With the recognition that other people matter, and that when we wrong them, we need to make it right.

Because if we don’t, there can be hell toupee.

Making It All Click

It was a Missy night in Chez Rochat. John Travolta would have been proud.

Anyone who knows our developmentally disabled ward Missy also knows her idea of a night well spent: loud music, strong beats and enough space for her favorite dance moves. Since she also has cerebral palsy, these tend to be fairly simple moves — including a carefully turned full-body spin — but no less heartfelt for all that.

One night the joint was jumping especially well when I noticed Missy shaking her hands back and forth. I looked more closely.

No. Not shaking.

Missy was trying to snap her fingers.

She couldn’t quite get enough friction. Sometimes it was even the wrong two fingers. But there was no doubt what she was trying to do. It was the same emphatic gesture I always used to keep the beat — and make her giggle — during a high-energy song.

“All right, Missy!”

There’s been quite a few moments like that lately. Moments with our mostly silent young lady where something just seems to … well, go “click.”

Like another dance step, one foot crossing over the other to point, despite her balance issues.

Or looking at a word list when I ask her to find “Blake” and picking out “Dog” — which he is, indeed.

Or even just the chattiness we’ve been hearing about from her day program, the stream of emphatic words, syllables and phrases that both surprise and delight the folks working with her. (One newer employee used to think she didn’t speak at all; not a surprising conclusion when you consider that Missy spends words the way Ebenezer Scrooge used to spend shillings.)

None of it is a huge spotlight moment, like Helen Keller signing “water” in The Miracle Worker. But small steps matter, too. Especially to the person on the inside.

That one, I know very well.

For me, too, it wasn’t exactly a snap. I showed signs of epilepsy as a young kid, and even after medicine brought it under control, there was still a lot to do. Physical therapy helped my balance and cross-body coordination. Games of chess in the school resource room focused my concentration and memory. But some skills took a long while.

And the one that I remember best, oddly enough, is snapping my fingers.

I couldn’t do it. Could not. I was embarrassed enough that in music class, if a song required snapping, I’d click my fingernails together so it would at least look right.

One night in fourth grade, I somehow decided I’d had it. With the door closed so no one would hear me, I sat up in bed, trying and trying and trying again, pressing and releasing my fingers until I thought they’d fall off.

…Snap.

I’m not sure what time it was. But I remember the relief and amazement when I finally heard that first sharp “snap.” To be honest, I almost couldn’t stop.

It was a small milestone. Maybe even more of a yardstone. But to me, it was huge.

It was an acknowledgment that I wasn’t that different.

I think most of us need that assurance at one point or another. Even those without disabilities. And the way we get it usually isn’t through brass bands and bright marquees. It’s by small gestures, even tiny ones, that affirm we’re worthwhile.

Think of it from the other direction. Most of us can still remember small wounds and humiliations we got in junior high school, tossed off without thinking. Why shouldn’t a small kindness last just as long?

Any of us can do it. More of us should. Some of us probably have without realizing how much we were doing.

Some things really are bigger on the inside.

Missy’s dance goes on. The steps look small. But each one is a celebration, a subtle triumph. Nothing flashy, true. Nothing you could lay your finger on.

But maybe someday she will.