Summer Ritual

When I was growing up, our parents took us to the Boardwalk at night. I remember the excitement that consumed me as we waited for the day to pass. And as I remember it, the anticipation wasn’t overblown; the Boardwalk truly delivered.

As an adult, I found it loud and overstimulating, and riding the Giant Dipper gave me a headache. But I took vicarious pleasure from watching my daughter take the ride-induced adrenaline high to new levels, levels to which I had never aspired.

When she was nine, Carly headed for the seats at the very back of the Pirate Ship, where it rocked to a complete vertical. She held her hands up high over her head, even when the ship dropped down and terror momentarily crossed her face. Standing under the Pirate Ship, watching my daughter’s face change from surprise to fear to sheer happiness, was as much a pleasure as were the twilight evenings of my childhood, when I had walked hand in hand with my dad and my brother Timothy won me a china cat at a game booth.

Eliot’s approach to the Boardwalk was different; his required acute observation and, like most everything else he did, lots of time. He spent the summer of his seventh year carrying around a photograph of Carly and her friend Jessica on the Giant Dipper. Only because he knew he was not tall enough, he kept saying (with mischief in his eyes, because until he met the height requirement he knew we couldn’t call him on it) “I want to go on the Big Dipper.”

At seven, he rejected the kiddy rides and went straight for the Log Ride, where he strolled confidently through the line. But he yelled, “Get me out!” as soon as our log boat reached the top and plunged into the snaking trough of water high above the beach. When it was over, he parked himself safely at the bottom of the ride and laughed at each boat as it careened down the final drop.

After that he took my hand and led me to the roller coaster. Although it was a roller coaster for little people, it went fast and had plenty of dips and turns. He waited patiently in a long line. There was no pulling on my arm or devious behavior. When finally it was our turn we climbed on, and the roller coaster started its wild ride.

I was acutely aware of the air underneath us, how far we were off the ground, the dizzying effects of the turns; while riding with my son who was gravitationally insecure, I was totally empathetic. He cried out and grabbed my arm, but when the ride was over he laughed as if it was the greatest thing he’d ever done. The next year he steered clear of the Log Ride and the Little Dipper and went back to the kiddy rides.

For most of us, the Boardwalk was about sugar and adrenaline, anticipation and fulfillment. It was about riding high under a sky full of stars. But for Eliot it was about staying on the ground. Both literally and figuratively. It was about learning to wait in line, trying new things, figuring out what you liked and didn’t like. It was about learning to say No Thanks to the Log Ride, and Yes Please to the Giant Dipper where you didn’t stand a chance of being allowed on. It was about vicarious pleasure and saving face.

I had always thought Eliot stared at the picture of Jessica on the Big Dipper because he was in love with her, her deep brown eyes and her three years up on him. But that wasn’t it. Carrying that picture was his own private initiation into the world as he knew it. It was his way of figuring out where he fit in.

On the Bus

Most people were still asleep when Lisa Mohary started her day. She got up at four forty-four a.m., "angel time,” as she called it. That way she could have a cup of coffee in peace and quiet before heading out to pick up a bus full of kids.

Lisa was not the only driver with early morning duty. When her Toyota Camry with Kentucky plates pulled into the parking lot at Santa Cruz City Schools, the other drivers were already climbing into their buses for the morning safety check.

A smattering of clouds on the horizon turned bright pink as the sun rose behind them. The day had not even begun, but Lisa teared up as she tried to describe what her job meant to her. The students she transported were, for the most part, physically or learning disabled.

"I can't put it into words," she said, as she started her morning safety check. "A lot of people think, 'They're just bus drivers, don’t get behind them, they'll cut you off,' but every kid is my own. It makes me cry from happiness that I get to spend time with them."

“Can’t you just drive him to school?” my husband Blue asked apprehensively the first time little yellow school bus pulled up in front of our house. But Eliot loved the bus, and I loved his drivers. Lisa was Eliot’s driver for three years. One hundred percent Hungarian blood, she had the long straight hair of a child of the sixties, and the easy smile of a woman who rolled with the punches.

Lisa’s safety inspection took fifteen minutes. She lifted the hood and checked the oil, then walked around the outside of the bus checking her tires, her stop sign and splashguards. She climbed back in the bus, opened, closed, and locked the emergency doors, checked and covered the wheelchair lift. Then she drove the bus to the front of the lot to test the brakes, parked, and greeted her friend Tony the Irrigation Specialist. Dressed in shorts and work boots, he poured her a cup of espresso from a stainless steel thermos. This too was part of her morning ritual. On her way to her mailbox, she greeted her boss, the electrician, a maintenance worker, and her fellow drivers.

Lisa headed back out to her bus, pulled into traffic on Mission Street, and drove toward the East side for her first pick-up. She waved to a man she didn’t know standing at a metro bus stop.

Her first stop was an apartment complex off of Ocean Street by the river levee. She honked the horn to the tune of “Shave and a haircut,” her trademark beep. Several students emerged from the apartments and boarded the bus.

By the time Lisa pulled up in front of our house at ten minutes to eight, the bus was full. Most mornings as I escorted Eliot onto the bus, our local station, KPig in Freedom, California, was playing on her radio, Tom Waits with his gravely voice, or Emmy Lou Harris belting out some soulful, earthy tune. "Good morning, Mama Tory," she would say.

On the bus with Eliot was a hodgepodge of kids, including the group of first through third graders who made up his class at De Laveaga School. There was Carla,* a dark eyed beauty with a long braid down her back and a penchant for mischief. There was Brittany, who loudly announced all infractions to Lisa while her classmates tried to hide behind the wall of seats. There was Yesenia, and there was Cecilia, who had open heart surgery as an infant and had grown only a little bit. Yesenia’s giant palm encircled her tiny hand.

Taller and more mature than her bus mates, Yesenia told her driver, "Turn here, you need to pick up Juan." Lisa called Yesenia her "guide," and dropped her off last so they could talk.

When Yesenia got off the bus, Lisa told her she loved her. Yesenia always said "I love you" back. This was Lisa’s intent. She called it resonance, or love that spread like sound waves.

After she dropped Eliot and his crew at De Laveaga, Lisa headed to Bayview School for what she called her “Westside sweep.” Then she headed back down Mission Street. At two o’clock she would trace the same route she followed in the morning, only backwards. The kids were “still asleep” in the morning, but in the afternoon they would be loud and cranky. Arguments would break out, and my son would call Juan, who was nine, “Baby,” over and over until Juan couldn’t stand it and screamed for Eliot to stop. But Eliot would not stop. Then Lisa would get on her radio and call me, letting me know she was dropping off Eliot first. She had been driving my boy since he was three, none worse for the wear although Eliot could be challenging. “Everyone deserves equal respect,” she said.

“We are family,” she sang, when tensions rose and her passengers threatened mutiny. When she’d been off for a few days, she said, she had to mold them into family again.

Next to her mirror on the bus, she had taped a picture of her daughter’s fifteen-month old girl, and next to that was the picture of Eliot we had given her. Her own life was slowly moving toward Kentucky, where she and her boyfriend owned a house, and where they could be close to her daughter in Nashville. She grew up “off the turnpike” in New Jersey, but she felt more of an affinity with Kentucky.

When Eliot was in preschool, she played kids’ tapes on the bus and sang along with him. One day my neighbor heard a grown voice singing, "Quack, quack quack!" and looked up to see the little yellow bus rounding the corner. There in the driver’s seat with the window wide open was Lisa, singing loudly to The Farmer and the Dell.

When Eliot was obsessed with boats, she drove him past the yacht harbor after she picked him up from his preschool. Once he started going to school closer to home, she drove past an old boat on a trailer far from the ocean.

"I tell him I'm going to take him on that boat some day if the water comes high enough,” she said. The kids knew the routine, and when they passed it they’d say, “There's the old boat.”

After she moved I would miss her. I would miss her ability to embrace all of our children, the ones who disrupted the classroom and confounded their teachers.

"Every kid that comes in my circle," she told me, " is there for a reason. I drove this one kid who wore a bee-keeping outfit with rubber gloves. No one else could handle him but I loved him. He played heavy metal on his boom box. I try to let my kids be themselves. We’re just a melting pot driving down the road. “

“I'll drive anybody," she said. "I'll drive the undrivable, and we'll have a good time."


*(The names of Eliot's busmates are fictional.)

Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program

It was by chance that we stumbled upon the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program at Alpine Meadows. We had been taking our son Eliot to ski school at a different resort, where the head of the program went out of her way to line us up with her best instructors. Still, Eliot spent the greater part of the expensive lessons inside drinking hot chocolate.

I was bemoaning this fact to my friend Scott, a mogul hoppin’ skier with a disabled son of his own, when he told me about the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program where he had just skied in a benefit race. Scott didn’t say so, but I guessed part of his motivation for skiing the race was that his son Travis, who was born with Stickler’s Syndrome, had died when he was seven years old.

Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program is designed for skiers of all ages with all kinds of abilities, from veteran skiers who have suffered strokes, to children with severe physical or mental disabilities. Often the lessons are booked by Special Day Classes like the one we saw our first time there. Crowded onto the sofa and benches in the waiting area of the small cabin at the foot of Alpine Meadows was a group of middle school students from the Bay Area, many of whom were seeing snow for the first time. They were from an SED class (Severely Emotionally Disturbed) and they had earned the trip with good behavior. After their lesson they were heading back to the Bay Area. Their teacher, who had driven them to the snow in his Suburban, opened a garbage bag and started distributing ski clothes. He handed one boy a pair of gloves and some bibs (ski overalls) that were the teacher’s own.

That day there was a foot of new powder, and coming down from Scott Chair’s double black diamond slope was one of the program’s instructors. A paraplegic, he was strapped onto what was essentially a seat on skis, with miniature skis attached to his poles. He came flying off the mountain, jubilant and covered from head to toe in fresh powder.

The equipment room at the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program is loaded with specially adapted skis and poles like the ones the instructor used venturing down Scott Chair. For Eliot there were the clamps screwed onto the tips of the skis that kept them from crossing. Learning to snow plow happens at a particular developmental stage, and at ten Eliot was still trying to master it. The clamps forced his skis into a V, so that the following year and a few lessons later when his instructor Laura took them off, he snow plowed on his own. Laura called it muscle memory.

Before his first lesson at the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program, Eliot was apprehensive. He stood at the base of the chair lift for a long time, listing for Laura all the reasons he did not want to get on the chair. In fact, it wasn’t until the following year that he surprised us by letting go of his death grip and skiing by himself (well, partially let go; he held onto the ski pole with nobody on the other end.) Not only that, instead of spending the entire lesson asking when it would be over, he burned through the two and a half hours --in a total blizzard.

“He’s unstoppable,” Laura said.

The next morning Eliot got up and put on his ski clothes. He insisted on eating breakfast in his ski boots and goggles. He was ready to go two hours before the mountain opened.

Our last morning in the snow, we woke to partly cloudy skies and fresh powder. It was Sunday and we were scheduled to leave before noon. Having packed most of our stuff the night before, I snatched up a two-hour Mom’s getaway, and I was in line for the Funitel before it opened. This was something I had never attempted with the kids. The pushing and shoving with other early birds hyped up on caffeine and adrenaline was something I could have done without, but the rewards were rich; I was skiing powder on the other side of the mountain before nine a.m.

At the top of the mountain I was stunned by the view of Lake Tahoe and the snowy peaks behind it. To think that I had considered staying in that morning. I had gone through all the inner dialogues: I didn’t have time; Blue and the kids were waiting; what if the other side of the mountain was closed? But I had pushed through the doubt and was rendered breathless by the beauty I took in. It was not unlike the joy experienced by Tahoe Adaptive skiers when they overcame challenges and took on the mountain.

By ten o’clock what little terrain was open on the other side of the mountain was skied out. I started down the mountain run, putting the skis in cruise control. Halfway down I saw the chairlift that runs across the high camp and gives skiers access to the less crowded bowls and chutes on the front portion of the mountain. I had never taken this chair. I could easily have continued my mountain run, but again I pushed through the inner dialogue and hopped on the chair. There were only two or three other people on the lift, and the lift operator gave me sinister smile. But by then I was committed.

I need not have worried. What awaited me was an east-facing slope, more crust than powder but doable, that funneled back into the mountain run. (There were other more adventurous routes, but they did not lead to the bottom.) What I did that morning was what Tahoe Adaptive Ski instructors did every day: they helped countless skiers push through their fear; they made the run down the mountain a piece of cake.

I turned in my ticket while others were still finishing breakfast, and we were on the road by eleven-thirty. All the way over the summit I listened to the Indigo Girls. What better music for the snow than acoustic guitar riffs and harmonies and the occasional violin? I felt the pure high that comes from exhilaration in the mountains, and the Indigo Girls were singing. Eliot was singing too. He said he wanted to stay in the mountains forever.

By the time we hit 4000 feet, Eliot was anticipating our next adventure, a complimentary trip to Disneyland. As we watched the snow disappear around us, he sang a combination of It’s a Small World and We Wish You a Merry Christmas:

“It’s a Small World After All, So bring it right here!”

It could have been the Tahoe Adaptive Theme song.