Congenial-speak #24

Looking for that timing

There really was a distinction. It looked and sounded different. The opportunities found a copius disproportion. I was still me, but how I was seen, and how I saw the Thems in the world, on my my new faster street, even in my yard, was a different story. My second childhood began—or as I say in my memoir Ten Years and Change—“was due to begin” six weeks from January 8, 1971. The kids on my first residential street were due to grow estranged. They proved, at least twice, that “going home again” in any tangential sense can't be accomplished—ever. I came home from the hospital in March of that year. With the exception of the belated sixth birthday party I detail in the book, I have few remembrances of any interaction with those friends before we moved in 1972. I was busy adapting to Michael Dowling school where, besides going through (again) K then grades 1-3, I received therapies. I excelled there in a pool that was dedicated by FDR. I was rehabbing at the U of M and walking with my dad. I was pushed, I needed to be motivated. For years as an adult getting into the gym was second nature to me. I attribute that to my past. The coaching by my dad and numerous therapists gave me that drive, the determination that it took do do something like competitive bodybuilding (“Exercising Demons” Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation).

The kid, four years younger than me, two doors down, became the first friend I made on our new street. He seemed genuine enough, and it did not begin as a lopsided friendship (something that seems to result, and come out as the bitter truth with many “friendships”). He needed me like I needed him. But then he had three older sisters and a house politically divided. The women were all Republicans, leaving him and his dad to harvest their liberal lawn signs. He spent a lot of time out of he house. It wasn't like, obviously, when I was still able to catch or hit a ball (actually this kid's father, a coach, threw one of the only baseballs to me that I caught in a glove) could run, ride on two wheels or skate on blades or wheels. It's like I slowed down and, on Lyndale Avenue, grew into a world hat would slow down for me. Those kids on Aldrich had their timers set. They remembered the mike Amram that could do all those things, tings I fondly remember in the memoir Ten Years and Change. We were both young. Their lives went on in their time as I was gone from that picture for a little over a month.

Cars went by faster, much faster, on Lyndale. I was slower, much slower, as the new kid on the block. But some, the first being the kid I mentioned, made it work. Then came the mainstreaming. The relatively new program of assimilating kids with extraordinary needs back into the “regular” public school system (today the whole concept is pretty much moot). I returned with a crutch or two on my sleeves to Central Elementary. Near the fall of 1973, with only one occupational therapist there being strongly in favor of my leaving, I moved on from Michael Dowling. I must then have begun the 1974 school year. I was in fourth grade. It was hell (“My Day of Reckoning” in Finding me—and Them). Mid-way through the year I finally made a friend—sort of—destined to be lopsided. Forced friendships are haunted by limping ghosts like Quasi Moto. They find you in time, waiting to ring with their jaded bongs. I don't remember if I heard it said to someone else, or if he said it right to me. It turned out that, after months of slow-paced revelry, the teacher had told him to be my friend. I had friends, a core group that including him, through high school. I never forgot that though, that friend on consignment. That how the current had to go, I guess, back in the mainstream.