Eliot's Summer Olympics

Eliot hates to dive. The sensation of being upside down with his skull hitting the water first is more than the guy can take. But he loves to jump from the diving board. He drops his skinny arms to his sides and jumps straight as a pencil.

Eliot has a tendency to be drawn to the things he was once most afraid of. It’s human nature, and swimming is no exception. I have been teaching him to swim since he was three. I started teaching him to side-breathe early on, but there was a lot of coordination involved. To keep him from lifting his head, I taught him to roll over on his back to take a breath, but he panicked, folded his body, and sank.

The summer he was twelve it all came together. He kept his head down and the side-breathing arm lifted out of the water for the first time. When he held his hand in a fist as he has a tendency to do, I told him to “high-five” the water and he did. He started swimming back and forth across the pool and not listening to anything I had to say.

Then we went to Huntington Lake. In past summers when he was being a pain, we’d throw his bathing suit on and toss him in the lake. But the summer he was twelve he took matters into his own hands. Every morning he jumped in the water and swam back and forth from the dock to a boulder a few yards out, and every afternoon he swam across Line Creek Cove.

Although water skills were critical, the real reason I taught him to swim and ride a bike was to give him the same coping mechanisms I used; starting the day with a run or a swim numbed me to the stress. Being connected to the outdoors was important too, but so was the link of mind, body, and spirit. It was easy for a child with motor difficulties to slip into his own world and operate more from the brain than the body.

We still had to medicate him, though (or as Blue called it, zap him) much as we wished we didn’t. One night at Huntington we accidentally double dosed him; I zapped him after Blue already had. It was actually a blood pressure medication, and on a conscious level I worried I’d killed him. On a more subliminal level I knew I hadn’t, and rather than rousing him from our beds on the deck and driving hours to the nearest hospital, I sat in the car and tried to reach his pediatrician on the cell phone. But I didn't have the night number and kept getting voicemail. I cried when Blue climbed in the car.

“He’s going to be okay,” Blue said. “He’s strong.” I knew he was right, but I kept trying to reach someone. I couldn’t find a working number for the doctor in Big Creek, and called our hospital in Santa Cruz, only to be told they would not give medical advice over the phone. 911 said the same. I left a tearful message for my sister-in-law Connie who was a nurse. She told me later she was glad I left a second, more coherent message, as the first was unintelligible. Good thing my limit was two margaritas or it really would have been unintelligible.

She also told me to call Poison Control next time. We’d had that number taped to the wall when our children were small and eating “berries” they found in the backyard, but over the years we'd forgotten about it.

Blue and I left a voicemail for the pediatrician, turned off the phone, and went to bed, agreeing to check on Eliot each time we got up to use the bathroom. Every time I stood over him in the moonlight he was breathing. When he got up to use the bathroom with Blue, I was relieved and slept in earnest.

In the morning the pediatrician’s assistant relayed a message from Dr. Griger that Eliot would be "a little dizzy" and not to resume medicating him until the following morning. It was hard to wake him, and he stayed in bed longer than usual, but once he was up he was full of piss and vinegar.

He wound up that night. The only good thing about it was that he eventually calmed down without his meds. This helped quell my fears about drug dependency, not just Eliot’s but ours as the parents who medicated him in an effort to cope.

He ended up helping me do the dishes. He even gripped the dish brush, instead of holding it with two fingers to keep his hands from getting soapy.

“You don’t have to like him, only love him,” I told Carly, quoting my friend Elizabeth, when she expressed her frustration about her brother.

“I don’t love him either,” she said. I could see how she felt so I didn’t argue.

There was a brief revival when we climbed into bed that night and Eliot sang at the top of his lungs. But we ignored him, the best tactic whenever possible, and the singing died out after a while. What he sang, over and over, was 

“We like our cheese,
we like our cheese,”

and
“We like our friends,
we like our friends…”

Then he brought in his bedtime companion Curious George. “Background singing, George,” he commanded, and the voice went falsetto,

“We like our cheese,
we like our cheese…”

Blue and I lay in our sleeping bags in the moonlight, agreeing it was pretty good bedtime music.

Superstar

I'm not a very good liar. So when Carly asks me a question point blank, I find a way to answer honestly. This means many of our discussions take me by surprise. True, from the time she was little I've been informing and preparing her, and anything I've left out she learns about at the skate park. But being equipped with hormones is not the same as being equipped with brains, and Carly and I talk a lot about the difference.

Carly has broached topics with Eliot too. She has been fending off his light sabers, nerf guns, or simply his appendages which make good weapons, from the time he could walk. And in a fit of frustration one day she burst out with a new nickname: “Disability brother!”

I sucked in air and looked at Eliot. He had that glimmer in his eye, what Blue calls Dr. Evil.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t contemplated it before. When he visited the Bay School for the first time, he studied the student self-portraits framed and hanging near the entryway. “Who’s that?” he said, pointing to one, and I read the student’s name. “Does he have a disability?” he asked, and I said yes. We went through this several times, and he never asked the next question, but I could see the wheels turning: Why am *I* here?

My gut tells me if we leave room for a bit of mystery our children will ask the hard questions when they are ready. And Carly has always been relieved to hear the answers. So it was that Eliot seemed to relish his latest nickname, Disability Brother. Probably he figured it would get him out of doing his homework or taking out the compost.

That would explain the lyrics I heard him add to an original song:

“I’m in the grocery store
I don’t know what I’m doing,
Where’s my wife.”

Of course Carly has called him worse, and I come down on her for that. The skate-park may have helped raise our daughter, but I don’t want our special needs child walking around using the F word. Still, even as a die-hard Obama fan, I know the African proverb Hillary Clinton brought to light is true, that it takes a village to raise a child. A lot of people in our community have had a direct hand in shaping Eliot, and what they do I first noticed with his teacher Robin: they love the kids, give them their dignity, and maintain a sense of humor. What these mostly young adults possess, though, that allows them to succeed in the face of behaviors like Eliot’s is much simpler; it is not their gift so much as a willingness.

Eliot has no idea how to relate to the peers he so desperately wants as friends, and adults, I have come to realize, are more easily able to relate to him and facilitate his interactions with other people. He feels safe with these adults, especially the heads of Kid Quest Colleen and Nichole, who provided stability and consistency when his school life was all over the map.

Another critical adult is James, who works with Balance4Kids and is Eliot’s guitar teacher. Seeing Eliot’s resistance to learning chords, James takes a back-door approach to lessons, jamming with Eliot to build calluses and finger strength. Occasionally he slips in a suggestion like, “Dude, I want to see you play one of your power chords during this song.” One afternoon after countless hour-long ear-splitting jam sessions, Eliot hit a power cord and held it through one whole song with James. At the end of the song his teacher erupted: “I have to give you a hug because I heard your power chord and it sounded really good.” James floated out of our house that day.

Eliot may be short on chords but he has all the moves of a rock star. Plus he can sing. He puts on Carly’s Crème, Hendrix, and Sublime cd’s and sings into the microphone for hours. Once in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, while other children listened quietly to their mothers reading tooth fairy books, Eliot sang at the top of his voice, “Those were the days, my friend, I thought they’d never end!”

And when he got tired of that, “NaNUH nanaNUHna NUHna, Tequila!”

But Blue’s and my favorite was Eliot’s refrain during the Bay School’s one week of summer vacation: “School’s OUT for Summer! School’s OUT for EVER!”

Poor kid, we thought, he’s going back next week, but by Sunday he was excited about returning to school.

A few weeks later we took Carly and Eliot to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar at Cabrillo College. There was nothing a museum or play could teach Carly, and she was feigning sleep, but each time she closed her eyes I slapped her leg with the program. Eliot, on the other hand, was riveted. When Jesus was dying he kept asking in a loud voice, ”Is he taking a long time to die?” and “Is he dead yet?” This made me think he might be ready for the opera.

"How did Superstar die?” he asked the next day. I posed the question back to him, and he said, “By drinking the Jesus drink.”

I was about to say no when I realized that in the profound sense it was true. “You’re right,” I said. Besides, in the musical version of the last supper the twelve disciples fell asleep drunk from wine and were lying all over the stage. So you could see how Eliot would come to the conclusion that Superstar died from the Jesus drink.

I decided to leave it at that. Sometimes preserving the mystery is the way to go.

Goodnight Moon

As expectant parents we paint the nursery walls with stars and planets, hang visually stimulating mobiles above the crib, and plant copies of Goodnight Moon on the bookshelf. Meanwhile the baby grows inside the womb in a genetic stew over which we have little or no control. So it is that each of our children is born into the world with his own set of plans.

Carly was born a survivor. She survived the playgrounds of schools with the lowest test scores, and endured sword and dart gun attacks from her brother. At six she played soccer on the unpaved streets of Colima with kids whose language she recognized but could not speak. And at fifteen she endured the boys at the city skate-park, who dropped x-rated comments as often as they told her to drop in on the half pipe.

Eliot was a different animal; enrolling him in public middle school was like tossing him into the jungle without his trusty light sabers and swords. He couldn’t even enter the sanctuary of the Life Lab Garden, much less the severely handicapped classroom, without erupting. When he was in the sixth grade I pulled him out of public school for good. By the time he started his new school, he had been home with me for a year.

In Santa Cruz and Monterey counties there are a myriad of services for families of children with special needs, including Balance4Kids, San Andreas Regional Center, SPIN, and Easter Seals. There are special education teachers and occupational and speech therapists in all the public schools, many of whom have made a difference in Eliot’s life. But I only know of one school like the Bay School.

Even after the Bay School determined Eliot was a good fit for their behavioral and academic program, the process of enrolling him was not easy. But once he was enrolled staff and administrators told me repeatedly, "We'll work with Eliot," "We want him to be excited about coming to school," and "There is no behavior we haven't seen." They started by setting high but achievable goals for their students. And the sky was the limit in terms of the rewards the students could earn by meeting those goals: in Eliot’s case, a trip to the toy store, a hike, or an in-house concert. Environment and teacher-student relationships were paramount, and the students felt it. "I go to the Bay School," Eliot said with obvious pride after his first visit.

Throughout the day the Bay School used what was called Adaptive Behavior Analysis, documenting all of a student’s behaviors, antecedents to the behaviors, and consequences. Teachers met their students outside the building each morning, and escorted them out to their parents and buses in the afternoon, giving each parent a brief summary of her student’s day.

Blue and I called Eliot’s teacher Alona "unflappable," because her demeanor did not change even when the atmosphere around her became tense. She was exactly what an excitable student needed. Most of the time she came out and said, “Eliot had a great day.” On the days where he was aggressive she said, “He had a great morning,” and then filled us in on the difficult part. Instead of phoning us at home or work, staff members told us immediately after school what Eliot had done, the antecedents to the behavior if there were any, and how they had responded.

“It will get rougher,” Ethan, the director of the school, told me not long after Eliot started. “Most of the time our students meet their goals, which makes it challenging for them.” I appreciated the fact that Ethan was honest and proactive.

And it did get rougher. With Eliot there was no apparent antecedent to the first major incident, only hormones, the full moon, a pain his foot, who knows. I talked for a long time outside the building with his teacher and the psychologist. What they gave me were the specifics of the incident, but what I heard was that they considered it their job to decipher Eliot, and that they would do whatever it took to help him learn self-control. For the first time since Eliot’s third grade teacher Robin, Blue and I were able to let down our guards during school hours.

As Eliot and I walked to the car, I pointed out the hammerhead shark on his t-shirt. I told him this type of shark had an unusually shaped head that gave it acute vision and hearing so that it could more easily detect its prey. And it occurred to me that autistic kids carried their differences like hammerheads, sometimes odd, yet able with their unusual sensitivity to pick up electrical stimuli other beings couldn’t detect.

To me, the full moon was a beautiful orb that shone gold as it rose through the atmosphere, and the summer solstice brought fogless days and south swells. To Eliot, though, the gravitation of the sun and moon at that time of the year tugged at invisible forces within his body and sent it into its own mysterious orbit.

At that moment Carly was out surfing a south swell. Most of the time I had to beg her to hug me back, or let me feel the exquisitely soft skin on her cheek. But Eliot, a different soul altogether, doled out kisses like rain. That afternoon I was grateful he let me take his hand as we walked to the car.

Finding our Way in the Wilderness

The mountains instill in those who love them an insatiable hunger. When we are not on backcountry treks, we are planning hikes, pouring over maps, ordering moisture-wicking socks, or entering chat rooms to discuss the virtues of peanut butter versus trail mix. Or doing online research and making trips to the bookstore in pursuit of that tome written by yet another lover of the mountains. Anything to feed the hunger.

One summer when Eliot was six, my compadre Kate and I traded in our annual Yosemite adventure for a backpacking trip out of Florence Lake in the Central Sierra. We did not have to hike a long way to be in a complete wonderland of meadows, riverside trails, and astounding vistas.

People who don’t like to backpack wonder why someone would choose to hike miles with a forty-pound pack strapped to her back, only to dine on freeze-dried food and sleep on a half-inch thermo rest pad. But we do it for the views. We do it for the feeling, which car camping with its luxuries cannot replicate, that we don't need all the junk we haul around most of the time. This is not to say we do not love our luxuries. In fact we appreciate them more after one of these trips --as well as during them, when a bite of chocolate or a sip of hot coffee tastes all the better.

One early afternoon in August, Kate and I took the ferry across Florence Lake and started the five-mile trek to our destination. But someone had taken the sign out at the connector to the Pacific Crest Trail. Without the sign we never saw the junction, and with my less than brilliant navigational skills, we headed back toward Florence Lake, crossing the San Joaquin River before I realized my mistake.

Backtracking, we found a junction and headed down what we hoped was the right trail. The map said we needed to head east, and the written description I carried said we followed a “road,” which in reality was a series of tire tracks between stretches of granite. Where there were no tire tracks, we relied on the sun at our backs, bootprints in the dirt, and the occasional concrete pourings over granite.

Most comforting were the trail markers, stacks of rocks other hikers leave on boulders to help people find their way, but even those can be misleading. I started to pray. Between trail markers I stopped and searched for the next stack of rocks. Our eyes swept over grey stretches spanning miles of wilderness. There was nobody around, but their boot tracks assured us they had been there, and as we picked our way across the granite, the stacks got closer and closer together and we walked with more confidence.

After a while the road dropped down into forest and skirted a meadow we identified on the map. As we walked, four-thirty turned to five, and five to five-thirty. We were rapidly losing energy and it would be dark by eight o’clock. We crossed creeks several times, becoming more uncertain the deeper we moved into pine forest. Then out of the trees appeared our trail angel.

She was the first person we had seen since we left the San Joaquin River some four miles back. She had long hair and milky blue eyes and was wearing jeans. She said she worked at the ranch nearby and had come up to the road to look for the supply truck.

Determining that we wouldn’t make it to our destination by dark, I asked how far it was to the first set of campgrounds. She said less than half a mile. Someone had been stealing signs, she said, and we had been following the road which was much longer than the trail.

We followed our trail angel’s directions and arrived in camp at 6:30. We hung the bear bag just before night fell, and set up our tent in the dark. Too tired to eat, we gulped down all the water in our Camelbacks and crawled into the tent.

As I wormed into my sleeping bag I missed Blue. With his navigational skills we would never had been lost. But quickly my thermo-rest pad and down sleeping bag absorbed my body heat, enveloping me in warmth and comfort. I sent up a grateful prayer and fell asleep.

The next morning we prepared to head out. Packed up and without camp chairs, we sat back to back against each other, eating a simple breakfast of apples and cheese.

It was an easy two miles to the next campground, where we had to cross the San Joaquin River to reach our destination. Kate was afraid she would lose her balance and fall, pack and all, into the river. We took our packs off and changed into our Tiva sandals.

Before Kate realized what I was doing, I strapped on her pack and started to cross. The river was thigh-deep in spots and running fast, and several times the frameless pack wobbled on my back, my walking stick slipped on the rocks, and I regained my balance only at the last minute as my stick hit solid ground. I was bent over the rapids, and the water rushing past my face had a dizzying effect. But I made it to the other side, deposited her pack, and returned for my own. Ten minutes later we were setting up camp in a miniature paradise.

Scrambling over the rocks the following afternoon, we found stunning views of the San Joaquin River. There were boulders perched where they had rolled and stopped after some great shift, and rocks wedged together in graduating sizes with moss, grasses, and flowers growing between them, a landscape any gardener would envy. Upriver there was a split where the water ran through rapids on one side of the boulders and flowed deep and crystaline on the other.

We had crossed over into paradise, but getting there had been treacherous. In life with our children, Blue and I were still backtracking from the San Juaquin River to the junction. We hadn’t even reached the camp where Kate and I spent our first night. But we would get there, dropping in exhaustion and waking early to sit with our backs against each other, fortifying for the next phase of our journey.

What Blue and I were hoping, as we moved uncertainly between trail markers spread too far apart, was that our son would make friends and learn to read as rapidly as the adult teeth popping through his gums. But we were on the road, not the trail, and had we known how much longer the road was we might have become discouraged. Thankfully, with the signs ripped out we didn’t know where we were; we only knew we were on the road, and a road is always encouraging.

Eventually we would rejoin the trail and cross the river, where either one of us could be bending under the weight of the other’s pack, dizzy at the sight of the river rushing beneath us. Then we would be safe on the other side, but only until we crossed the river again to make the journey home.

Excavating for a Mine

“Be here now.” It was an expression I had heard a friend and teacher Ralph use with his students, and one I tried to live by. I used it often with Eliot. When he obsessed on something that had nothing to do with the task at hand I said, “Be here now, buddy." I didn’t explain what it meant, though.

Once when he said he was sorry for having hit someone, I said, “’Sorry’ doesn’t mean much. You are responsible for your behavior. Actions speak louder than words.” A few weeks later he targeted the object of his affection. Belle was an aide to his friend Aaron and worked at Kid Quest, the after-school program where Eliot spent a great deal of time, more so after I pulled him out of public school. I would say Belle was Eliot's first love. He’d had crushes and obsessions before, but this one hung on. He thought about her and wanted to ask her on a date, but when he actually saw her he put his head down and walked past her blushing.

“Can I give her a hug?” he asked when we were alone.

I said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have special feelings for her. And she’s older, so you can only be friends.”

One day on a Kid Quest hike he hit her. We discussed it afterward, many times, and a week later when he brought it up he said, “Words speak louder than words,” (getting it half right). Then he looked at me and said, “Be here now.”

There were a number of people who had helped me and Blue with Eliot, but one of the most indispensable was his third grade teacher Robin. She had introduced Eliot to the visual reading program called Edmark. Through repetition and a series of visual exercises, it combined words into sentences with enough contrast to embed the words into the reader’s memory. For the first time Eliot had begun reading sentences. But Eliot’s fourth and fifth grade teachers tried to teach him phonics, which had never worked. I finally got hold of the Edmark software, and in the winter of his sixth grade year when he was home with me full time, I started him again on Edmark. Within days he was reading sentences, and within a week he was reading stories.

He rolled his eyes at the inane Edmark voice, but he hung in there. At the end of every lesson the voice said, "Great! You did it! You're ready to move on!” (i.e.to the next lesson.) When we were done with our work one day, Eliot burst out of his chair and told the Edmark voice, "I'm moving on!" As in, I'm outa here.

Whether Edmark was drawing out what had always been there, or whether some parts were finally coming together, a mysterious transformation was taking place in Eliot's brain. The Now in the "Be Here" was ever exciting, and Eliot was as enthusiastic about Christmas as he had been about Halloween.

He wanted to put up the Christmas lights the day after Thanksgiving. He was worse than Walgreen’s. In Bed, Bath, and Beyond, he asked if we could buy the gaudy reindeer chips-and-dip plate. He lugged a huge boom box (On Sale!) into the cart. I guess the boom box was part of the Beyond.

But when I sagged at the prospect of Eliot at home full time, I found myself in early December pulling out the Christmas lights to lift my spirits.

Carly was not immune to the celebration either, although at her age Christmas was less exciting and New Year’s Eve intriguing. It wasn't drunken parties she was after, though; she simply pledged to stay up until midnight. Blue and I went to bed as usual sometime after nine, and woke at midnight to the sounds of fireworks and the door to the backyard slamming. Carly had run into the yard with her bongo drums, which she beat on to accompany the pops and booms of another year gone.

Carly's drum teacher gave her Jimmy Hendrix and Cream cd’s, and every week she came home excited about a new beat he had taught her. But her obsession at fourteen was surfing. She wanted to go every day. Some days I had to beg off just to do laundry.

Her screen-saver, the door of her bedroom, the background on her MySpace were covered with pictures of Hawaii. She could tell you all about the salty white-blond boys her age who had joined the pro-circuit. She even took up the ukelele.

On a dark rainy night in January I drove Carly to her first ukelele lesson. Her classmates were all people my age dressed for winter. Not a Hawaiian shirt in sight, although the instructor, “the Uke Lady,” was Hawaiian. As Carly said later, “It’s not very Wahine, just a bunch of people in scarves.”

Carly brought her ukelele when we drove up to Tahoe to ski at the end of January, and we had a concert in the car. Eliot had the coconut banjo his grandmother Sushi had brought him from from Tahiti, which he called his ukelele. He mostly strummed that, but he took his harmonica out once in a while and puffed out a chord.

Carly played the songs she had learned in her class. Her voice, sweet and unpolished, squeaked a bit on the high notes:

“In a cavern, in a canyon,
excaVAting for a mine
dwelt a miner forty-niner
and his daughter Clementine.”

Hawaiian immigrants had worked and died in the mines of the Sierra foothills during the Gold Rush, and undoubtedly sang their stories and songs round many a campfire. Likewise, the song list for Carly's class was a mix of Hawaiian and Mainland.

In “The Saints Go Marching In” she paused on a note change:

“Oh Lord, I want
to be in that -- NUmber.”

Of course the squeaks and pauses made the concert all the sweeter.

It snowed four of the five days we were in the mountains. Two of the days the temperature was in the low twenties, and we floated over fresh powder. This did not bode well for Eliot, who skiied the one day the sun came out. He was genuinely scared, and the weather didn’t help. But there was no turning back. The road up I80 in winter was part of his life now. As his mom, I was more at peace in the mountains than anywhere. It was the one place I even came close to a glimpse of our place in the universe.


"Oh when the saints
Go marching in,
Oh when the saints go marching in,
Oh Lord I want to be in that -- Number,
Oh when the saints go marching in."

A Day in the Life of Mr. Bones

If fluorescent lights and the pull of the moon affect an autistic child, imagine what puberty does. The confusion of being an in-betweener is magnified for a child with disabilities. In sixth grade when Eliot brought in his guitar for sharing time, he launched into a Jim Hendrix riff (without Jimi Hendrix's precision) then switched to The Wheels on the Bus, as if to say, "Where am I?"

Eliot had been anxious to start middle school, but when he got there he found it noisy, crowded, and overwhelming. His internal barmometer went whacko and so did he. He had learned the previous May that if he acted out he could go home, so he acted out and got sent home, over and over.

By the second month of school I had pulled him out again. We had an IEP meeting scheduled for the end of October, and it would take that long for the school system to offer Eliot the support he needed, support I had been asking for since May.

While he was home I didn't even try to do Edmark or Touch Math. It took all of my energy just to face the bigger picture of where Eliot's education was headed. But teaching opportunities presented themselves. We did the dishes and took the dog for walks. Eliot had gone from holding the dish brush with two fingers to gripping it and swishing it around the pan, and for more strengthening I made him hold the dog's leash. If he mutinied I offered to trade: I'd hold the leash and he could pick up the poop. Worked every time.

We took the dog on a walk through the woods, and Eliot was excited to stand inside a ring of redwood trees. I told him the stump on which he stood was the mama redwood, and after she died or was cut down, her babies grew in a ring from the stump. I pulled the leaf off a bay tree and held it to his nose.

One day we took an upper trail I had never walked. I knew where we would end up, but was unsure where the trail would lead us in the meantime, just as Blue and I didn’t know where we would end up with Eliot.

As we walked he asked dozens of questions.

“Where are we going?” Where indeed.

“Is this the kingdom?” he asked, referring to the forest in The Bridge to Terebithea.

“How do we get there?”

Of course I knew where Blue and I hoped we would end up, not how we would to get there. With Eliot we saw the sky as the limit, but in as many years as he had already lived, the sky would start pushing down on us. That was the reality. I did know one thing, though. My boy was becoming his own person and we needed to listen, to understand that he would arrive at some sort of independence in his early adulthood, but on his own terms as much as ours.

One Saturday Blue and I built Eliot a tree house in our backyard, his own Terebithea. We built a small platform, with steps and ropes for climbing up into the willow tree. After having asked for a tree fort for weeks, he ignored it when we finished it. Finally I took him out and helped him climb the tree. Halfway up, he stopped and asked to come down. He was afraid of heights and I had learned not to push too hard.

“Maybe in a year he’ll climb up,” I told Blue. Then I looked out the window and saw him standing halfway up to the tree fort. He went up and down several times, stopping at eye level with the platform.

A couple of hours later he was in the tree fort. Then he needed help getting down. A day or two later he went outside just before dark. When it got dark and I went to check on him, a small voice from the tree said, “I need help getting down.” The next day he was climbing in and out of the fort by himself, and I brought him and his cousin Neil a picnic lunch in the tree.

At any point in his growing life, Blue and I could build our child a fort in the tree and make sure the steps and platform were secure, but it was up to Eliot when he would climb up and take hold of the tree for himself. Every step a child like Eliot took toward the platform was a miracle.

The IEP was approaching at the end of October, and so was Halloween. Eliot decorated a bag for trick-or-treating. We took our annual trek to the pumpkin patch up the coast, and made soup from a white pumpkin, which Eliot called Halloween soup.

Although we were working with a nutritionist, Eliot was still skin and bones, and a skeleton costume seemed the perfect choice. He wore the costume through much of October. When we took Carly to surf practice, Eliot stood in the street at Pleasure Point in his mask. The steady stream of surfers driving by were duly frightened.

To walk the dog at night with his Dad, Eliot, already in his pajamas, put on a bathrobe and his skeleton mask. In the morning he wore his skeleton hands to eat breakfast. We called Halloween A Day in the Life of Mr. Bones, and took pictures of Eliot in costume walking the dog, riding his bike, playing the guitar. Although he had not heard the song that hit the pop charts when I was his age, he smiled when I sang,

"Me aaaaaaand Mr., Mr. Bones, Mr. Bones,
We got a thiiiiiiiing goin' on...."

"Dad and I are going trick-or-treating," he told me. "You stay home and hand out the candy." I did, gladly. Red wine goes perfectly with lesser-quality Halloween chocolate.

When they returned, I walked with Eliot to the haunted house up the block. Every year our neighbors, who live in a big, old restored Victorian, decorate the lawn elaborately with spider webs, skeletons, graves, lights, and scary music. Trick-or-treaters have to navigate the labyrinth to get to the rickety front porch where a cackling witch hands out candy. In its old-fashioned simplicity, it is the best Halloween display I've seen.

Eliot stood in the walkway of the haunted house for a long time, eyeing the witch, checking out the size of the spider, touching the hand of a skeleton. Then we walked home. After he handed out the last piece of candy, he put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth. As he climbed into bed he asked, “Can you take a picture of Mr. Bones going to bed?”

I did what I always did then, walked the neighborhood checking out people’s displays, moving from lit porch to lit porch like a ghost. A tulle fog hung over the coast that night; it could not have been more perfect.

Before I turned out the porch light, I emptied the pumpkins and moved them to the compost pile, marveling that there had been no tears, no hyperactivity, no meltdowns. The next morning when Eliot ran to the front porch and saw his pumpkins were gone, he cried. So I showed him the Day of the Dead decorations and took him out to the compost pile. I told him we were visiting the pumpkin cemetery for Day of the Dead. He had embraced Halloween from beginning to end, and even gave it a proper mourning.

The next week he returned to school with extensive support from a behavior specialist named Dawn. We agreed on a ten-thirty pick up for the first week or so, working our way to a lunch-time pickup and ultimately back to a full day. The two hours could not have come soon enough. It was not that Eliot’s company wore me down so much; I had enjoyed our time together in October. It was that I missed my time alone, to the point that when the week came for him to return to school I was noticeably depleted. A few days in a row of two solid hours' writing time would do me good. Then a swell came up and I found myself surfing Capitola alone. This never happens. Capitola Village is a swirl of tourists, surfers, and thriving restaurants year round. I guess the surfers were waiting for the tide to drop; it was high tide, but that was my window.

If you surf crowded breaks as I do, surfing alone can be eery. But I must have caught fifteen waves. I was there for forty-five minutes --an eternity-- before two other surfers paddled out, and the three of us took turns catching waves. Not a bad thing when the alternative is some surf-rat grabbing all the waves while routinely dropping the F-bomb. In that one-and-a-half-hour session, I felt my self return to some sense of normality. I did not know what Eliot’s future held, but whatever it was it would be okay.

Long May You Run

Blue's not much for camping, but when I remind him he has agreed to accompany me around the United States in an Airstream once the kids are on their own, he says, "Yes, and if Eliot's still living with us at thirty he can come too."

Eliot will make a fine traveling companion, but it was Carly who, when she heard of our plan, asked why we were waiting until she left for college to get a camper. Why, indeed, I wondered. Not long after that I bought a 1987 Volkswagon Vanagon Westfalia.

I bought surf racks, and installed a stereo system with a cassette player so I could listen to the old tapes I never played anymore. I found some Hawaiian fabric decorated with classic woody automobiles, and asked my friend Jenifer to help me make curtains. I had the muffler repaired, which improved the noise factor and exhaust emission, without eliminating the good old sound of a Volkswagon engine.

Once when I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge at night, the headlights stopped working and I had to drive to San Francisco holding one hand on the high beams. The next morning I called a Volkswagon mechanic in Santa Cruz and he said, "That's pretty necessary to fix." He must have been used to people with old hippy vans and no money.

Blue objected to my buying the van at first. He took every opportunity to point out beat-up old VW buses behind tow trucks or broken down on the side of the road. But on our first road trip to Oregon he became a convert.

Our friends Jeff and Elizabeth drove down from Washington, we drove up from California, and we met halfway at a campground on the Rogue River. Like most parents we often had to separate our children in the car, so on the way to Oregon I sat in back with Eliot. I loved sitting in back of the Vanagon on road trips. The view from the fishbowl windows was spectacular.

The vanagon went fifty miles an hour, pedal to the medal and downshifting, on upgrades, but it rode comfortably on the downhill and the flats. If you drove over 75 or hit some wind it shimmied like a sailboat, so I took to driving in the slow lane and letting impatient drivers pass. Blue joked that it would take us twelve hours to get to Grants Pass, Oregon, but it didn’t. We got there in eight and a half. That was when he suggested we take the van to the Surf and Turf.

In September we drove to San Luis Obispo for the Surf and Turf with our friends Tom and Nancy. The event included a surf contest, golf tournament, and a barbecue for a small group of friends. It was the kind of party where there were as many dogs as people. The year before (our first) an old Golden Retriever had laid on his back under the barbecue as the drippings streamed into his wide-open jowls.

The hosts of the party parked their restored woodie in front of the house, longboards sticking out the back. The Vanagon with its woodie curtains fit right in. I swiveled the passenger seat around to face the back seat, pulled out the table, and served margaritas.

The van may have been another romantic idea of mine, but it couldn’t have been more utilitarian. When the kids were little and I had a babysitter in the afternoon, I often parked it down at the cliffs overlooking the ocean, opened my laptop, and spent a couple of hours writing or paying bills. Once I drove down to the cliffs, parked and took a nap, woke up, and drove home.

We called it a house on wheels, a term I had learned from a man in a campground in Oklahoma. Two months before Blue and I were married, my friend Tamara and I had taken a road trip to New Orleans on I-20, camping our way across the southern states. As we set up our tent by a lake somewhere in Oklahoma, a truck with a camper pulled into the site next to ours, although the campground was nearly empty. The back door opened, revealing a scruffy guy in a pair of cutoffs. He cracked open a Budweiser and sat down, legs dangling off the end of his truck as if it were a dock and he was fishing for crawdads.

He watched while Tamara and I argued in loud whispers about whether or not to move. (She wanted to, I didn’t. What was I thinking?) Finally we collapsed our tent and stuck it back of my truck, getting ready to move to a site near some other campers and far away from Crawdad, as he came to be known.

“Y’all aren’t movin’ on account o’ me are you?” he said as we climbed in the truck. “’Cuz if y’are, I can move. Damn, my house is on wheels!”

We kept the Crawdad quote alive for the rest of the trip, and twelve years later I resurrected it when I bought the Westfalia. I took it for repairs to the Volks Cafe ten blocks from my house. I loved to park in the back lot and walk through the garage, picking my way through the carborators and Volkswagon engines spread across the greasy floor. The radio was always tuned to my favorite local station, KPig.

KPig was an eclectic station, part country, part Bluegrass, part rock and blues. You never knew if DJ and KFat founder Laura Ellen was going to play Robert Earl Keen or Sarah McLachlan, the Indigo Girls or Lucinda Williams. The Volks Cafe went up a few notches for me when I heard KPig coming from the mechanics' radio. Peter, the owner, was the top servicing vendor for Vanagons in the country. He and the other guys up front hopped out from behind the counter at a moment’s notice to tighten a mirror or do a test drive .

But my favorite part of the Volks Cafe was the bulletin board for customers selling their vehicles. Here are some of the postings:

“’78 VW van
70k original miles
Champagne edition.
Red/brown
Asking $2700”

“Lilith, the Wonder Van is finally up For Sale.
1977 VW Camper
Sleeps four with fridge, sink, stove
Doesn’t currently run -- needs engine work and new ignition.
Great for living in.
Yours for $500. Call Shalom”


“1966 Volks Baja Bug
Mechanic’s Special.
Blown engine.
$100 O.B.O.
You Tow or I Can for $100”

Seven years after I bought the van, I put up my own For Sale card on the Volks Cafe bulletin board. We had put twenty-thousand miles on the van, and I didn’t have the cash to maintain it anymore. After months of false starts, I received an email from a young woman in Alaska named Becky. She wanted a camper to travel around Texas where she would be attending graduate school.

As we emailed back and forth, it became clear Becky had done her homework. She was the kind of buyer I had been looking for. She paid for an inspection at the Volks Café, then listing the needed repairs, made me an offer. We settled on a price contingent upon a final inspection from her brother.

Her brother Matt was a surfer from San Francisco, who timed his trip to Santa Cruz with the next Northwest swell. Matt inspected the pop-top, the stove, the fold-out beds. As he adjusted the passenger seat for size, I told him I hoped, when they grew up, my son was as nice to my daughter as Matt was to Becky.

“Well,” he admitted, “the deal is I get to use the van until January.”

Matt called his sister with the details of his inspection. As he pressed her number into his cell, he looked at the clouds gathering in the sky and said, “I hope she makes a decision quickly. The wind's starting to come up.” Spoken like a true surfer.

I went inside for a few minutes to give him some privacy. When I came back out, he folded his phone and handed me a cashier’s check. I handed over the title, and the deal was done.

My plan after selling the van was to trade in our company-leased Explorer for one new car that fit all our family needs. I dreamed and searched, but for me there was no camper to replace the Westfalia. A Baja or Bust vehicle just didn’t fit into the immediate plan. What I found instead was what I had sworn I’d never buy: a soccer-mom van.

I chose a Toyota Sienna. My 1940 edition of the Webster’s Dictionary defines sienna as “a ferruginous ocherous earth of a … yellow color, used as a pigment in … painting.” Ferruginous, I found out when I looked it up next, means iron-rich. Except for maybe black, none of the color choices for the Sienna in 2007 was iron-rich. Instead they were various shades of mop water.

How did the Sienna win my heart, if not by the name? It had the extra set of seats in back for transporting Carly’s band to a gig in the Santa Cruz mountains, and those seats folded down to make tons of space for surf bins, duffle bags, ice chests, and a dog. But the real reason I chose the Toyota van was that you could open the back and slide two longboards up the middle. Convenient for the two hour surf getaway.

I couldn’t complain about a new car with good mileage and the best mechanical reputation in the world. But it would take racks, a lot of hibiscus stickers, and Sex Wax smears on the windows to make the Sienna look like a surf van.

As always, Blue understood. When I ordered the new van he said, “Thanks for taking one on the chin for the family.”