Farm Days

There comes a time in every young man's life when the realization hits him that he wants to outdo his father.

What each young man desires to surpass his father in, varies. I haven't yet conquered a steady theory behind this phenomenon, but I assure you, I've been thinking really, really hard about it all while sitting here, listening to mellow alternate rock music and eating microwaveable tequitos.
Still ... nothing.
When I was fourteen-years-old, I asserted that my life accomplishment would be to beat my giant-sized father in a game of basketball. I was tired of hearing about how successful a high school player the old boss had been, I felt it was time to introduce him to the new boss. By the time I was fifteen, dad's knees weren't what they once were and beating him in a pick-up game consisted of no more than insisting on driving to the hoop everytime I had the ball.
So good. Dad and I got through our little war without too much love lost. He was still heroic and yet I was allowed to feel worthy of assuming his crown.

But then, several years later, dad got a kick out of telling and retelling the story of the time he saw Tina Turner open for The Rolling Stones for a scant $2.00 entry fee. To see either of those acts these days (much less both) would cost no less than several of my limbs and the limbs of three of my closest friends*. I didn't realize it at the time, but his fortune (and price inflation in the music industry) really irked me.
I wanted to beat Dad.
Basketball was no longer my Holy Grail, no longer the benchmark in the subtley silent war between father and son. I wanted to see something big for almost nothing. The funny thing was, I hadn't articulated this desire until I found myself standing a mere forty yards away from my own idol, Bruce Springsteen in a Louisville arena back in 2000. The details of how this all came to be are better suited for another blog. But there I was with Bruce, for free.
And although the concert experience was sweet and something I will remember for a very long time, it turns out that the most beneficial garnish of that night was my ability to follow up my dad's story about his damn rock concert bargain.
The Rolling Stones and Tina Turner $2.00 = pretty darn good
Springsteen 0 dollars = brilliant magnificence.

I love my father. He is a hero to me in ways that should both humble and flatter him. And in a way, I guess my feelings for my dad in regard to this occasional and manic competetion that he isn't even aware of, leave me a little cold. Live and let live. This is how I hoped to view things once I left that Louisville arena half-a-decade ago.
And for the last five years, this is how things have remained.
But no longer.
The itch has arrived on it's pale white horse once again. But this is it, the final showdown.

* * *

For the past year, I have been employed at an organic farm in the backends of a Boston suburb. When I utilize the term farm, I am not expressing my environs with any hyperbole. The farm has hay and crops and hogs and wheel barrows and fertilizer and mangy dogs and chicken coops. This place even has a dinner bell, but my shift ends at 2 o'clock every afetrnoon so I never get to hear it.
Anyway, my job is technically to shaperone two autistic teenagers enrolled at the school that I work for. The Natick Farm is their employer, not mine, but because the farm relies on everyone's help to keep production successful year-round, they see no reason why I should only be there to supervise. They, in fact, see me as someone who should be picking up the slack for both my students, Danny and Big Moosey. Big Moosey is a giant teenager who could snap me in half if that was something he wanted to do. Imagine Of Mice and Men's Lenny only instead of overalls, he is clad in Red Sox paraphenilia and I don't usually get bothered with the mess of dead rabbits. Danny, on the other hand, has messily thick red hair and the uncanny ability to quote late-night infomercials in perfect pitch. He is disasterously unaware of most everything else including the ironic t-shirts his parents dress him in that say witty things like "Blame my parents" or "I'm not autistic, I'm just ignoring you".
These are my boys. This is my life. And this is the setting for what I hope is the final showdown with my father.

Since before I can remember ever wanting to outdue my own father in various meaningless life experiences, I've been regaled in stories of his childhood growing up on the animal farm. He grew up with dogs and horses and sheep. Pigs that passed away and became the following morning's breakfast, cows with no long term memory for cruelty.
Growing up in Chicago or parts close to, far away from country livin', I was always admiring of Pop's experiences; his ability to have acclimated so seamlessly from country to city mouse. I guess I always wanted that too.
Or at least that chance.

That chance slammed into my knees last July at about 15 miles per hour, was named Orville, and came in the form of a muddy bovine with a spirit harkening back to Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape".
"Hey Mr. S! You better grab dat pig, man!" shouts Moose successfully ignoring the fact that I'm on my knees in the mud like a hockey goalie preparing to, as Moose suggested, grab dat pig.
"Thanks Jay. I'll do my best. You wanna come gimme a hand?"
"Aw, naw man. You... You got it, man. Just grab 'im."
Right.
Just grab a slippery sow with the obvious intention to remain free. I went to a private art school, I take the train everywhere, I bleed easily. What previous life experiences have prepared me for pig wrastlin'?

Moose and Danny have spent a year on the farm before me, but you'd never know it to watch the melee that is unfolding on my first day on the farm. I scoot left, I scoot right, Orville just oinks in piggish glee realizing that the new lanky farm-hand is just as useless as his two autistic counterparts. And before you suggest that I'm being insensitive to both my students, and before you remind me that these kids are unlike you and me and before you poo-poo my reliance on them to carry out the job they have been sent there to do, keep in mind that I was smiling, okay? Not yelling, not screaming.
Also, the pig beds are nothing more than mud and lettuce.
And I was already tired from laying down new beds for the turkeys out of a soil that is mostly eight-month old leaves, lettuce and old spelt (fermented grains and vegetables), so I was already a mess and stinking of a hefty evening of boozing the night before.

So please, step out of your glass house and allow me a little saracasm.

"Just grab 'im Mr. S! You gotta grab 'im!"
"Moose, you come over here and grab him! He's fast, you know!?" Orville was in my grip for just a second, but the short, bristly hairs along his legs surprised me and I let go. Danny thought this was funny. At least I thought he did, because he decided to shout, "BOOM! Tough actin' Tenactin! BOOM! Tough actin' Tenactin!" And usually if he has sudden commercial outbursts, he is either annoyed or amused and seeing as how he was leaning against the cyclone fence doing little else but watching, I couldn't see Danny being all that annoyed.
"Aw, naw man. You can catch 'im, can't you, Mr. S? Huh? You... You can catch 'im, Mr. S."
For some reason, Moose insists on addressing me each time he talks to me. Every sentence aimed at me either starts or ends with "Mr. S.".

My patience was becoming scarce, as was the amount of unmuddied skin left on my body. This was my first day on the farm, and my boss (whose name was Skeet, if you can believe that) sent us into the pen without much warning that the pigs were feeling squirrelly this afetrnoon. I thought we were just putting some turkey beds down, man. Gimme some warning. I'm no pushover, but had I known I was gonna dirt dive this pig into the ground, I woulda worn my painter's pants.
So much of my job is defined by the results you get out of the students you are supervising. Even though they've been working for Skeet for more than twelve months previous to my arrival, Skeet seems like a likeable, but unforgiving country sort. The "what've you done for me lately" -type who might see my multiple missed tackle opportunites on this pink-menace to be a bad omen for Moose and Danny's socialization into the working world.
"Moose get over here! I need your help." With Big Moosey, the difference between a question and a statement has nothing to do with tone of voice or punctuation, and everything to do with the "thank you" that you have to put at the end of the sentence when you want to ensure that there is no confusion.
"Moose! Chase Orville close to me, so I can grab him. Thank you."
"Aw. Okay, Mr. S. You want me to chase the pig? Huh? Is that what you want me to do? I'm gonna get dirt all over me, Mr. S. I'll get all muddy."
That's Moosey in a nutshell, I'm covered in slop and old lettuce and blood and I'm on my knees and mumbling swears to myself but he doesn't wanna soil his Red Sox t-shirt.
I could kill him.
Moose starts shooing Orville closer to the side of the pigpen that I'm on. I decided moments ago that the second Moose got close enough to me, that I would toss a chunk of slop on him. That's what teachers are for; to educate and to experience lessons of life from... well, today's lesson was gonna be never to watch your teacher get put through the grinder while you sit on the sidelines trying not get dirty.
Remember, the far was their job, not mine.
I finally wrangle Orville, a feat I'm still unclear if I did correctly. I tried to grab the pig around the belly, but realized he was about three seconds away from another escape, so I bailed out and grabbed his two hind legs.
On a completely unrelated note, it is my opinion that a pig's squeal is the most horrific noise registered by human ears.

We get the pig back inside the enclosed portion of the main pigpen (where the pigs sleep and discuss pig stuff amongst one another) and I stand there looking at Moosey, then at Danny. Danny hasn't moved from the fence.
"How you feelin' Danny?"
He replies quickly and with a slight lisp, "I feel happy."
"Good, Danny", I say. "Good."
"You got mud on you, Mr. S."
"I know, Moose. I was laying in a pig pen for the past five minutes, remember?"
"Oh. Yeah, Mr. S. You were. You were workin' hard, huh? Huh, Mr. S.? You were workin' hard, huh?"

And there it was. "You were workin' hard, huh?"

Clarity.
And then it was as if the mud washed away from my body. It was as if Moose had spoken the secret to eternal life. It was suddenly as if I hadn't spent the last few days on the farm chopping and stacking wood, or piling boozed-up leaves on the floor of a 90 degree chicken coop or purifying mulch, or rebuilding portions of the tool barn or wrangling hefers while my students stood stone like and watched me. I was working hard. Harder than I've worked in a long, long time (physically speaking anyway), maybe ever.
There were only two people in my life I could count on knowing the fatigue and frustration farmwork had left me with. My roomate Armin (real name), who had this particular job with Moose and Danny last year, and my father.
My father, whom could no longer guilt me into taking out the trash by telling me of all the early mornings he spent milking his cow. I no longer have to sit idly by and let my Dad tell his bumpkin tales of childhood farmhanding, and if he does go into them, I can interrupt him with some of my own. We can connect. Not that we couldn't before, but as I mentioned previously, these father/son competitions are one-sided and arbitrary and now I've got experience instead of longing.

Orville was worth a winning game of hoops and free Springsteen tickets any day of the week. My greatest fear now is my Dad telling me that when he was twenty, he was always able to get autistic kids to listen and obey him.

===================================

* I don't wholly believe my father. I believe that he saw The Rolling Stones and Tina Turner, but I doubt it was for only $2.00. I imagine, in reality, he saw them for $25.00 and Tina got frustrated with Ike halfway through the set and forced Mick and Keith to do the extra long version of 'Midnight Rambler'. Over the years, Dad has either forgotten the truth or chosen to ignore it. To my kids, grandpa will probably tell them he saw The Stones, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix play at a backyard pool party where the cover was only a dime. It is my job as a parent not to raise such gullible children that they believe all the lies my father will try to get over on them.

The Lock and the Key

The following editorial was submitted for approval in both the Boston Globe as well as the Wellesley Times. It was written in various intervals between March and April, 2006.

This blog is, in no way, intended to be humorous.

* * *

For the last fifteen months, I have been employed as an after school mentor to a 20-year-old male whom, for the purposes of this editorial, I will call Paddy. Paddy has a rare disability found within the autism spectrum called Fragile X. Fragile X can run the gamut of both symptomatic manifestations and the severity of such symptoms. Paddy is considered a moderate-functioning autistic, with characteristics ranging from an inability to control fine motor skills, an inability to focus his eyes on any one fixed subject for more than a few seconds, to occasional and tremendous social anxiety.

This social anxiety manifests itself in any number of ways. Sometimes it is simple shyness, reluctance to speak or be noticed. Other times, this social anxiety causes Paddy to nervously fiddle with small objects in his hands. These objects are often comforting to him, things like paper or compact discs. His anxiety is known to gradually grow in immediacy the longer it is ignored. So much so that instead of fiddling, he will feel the need to shred the paper or shatter the compact discs. The physical manifestations of Fragile X are minimal, secluded only to slightly bulbous extremities (fingers, toes, etc.), enlarged gums causing smaller exposed tooth space, a shrill effeminate voice and loose, weakened joints in the wrists, ankles and knees causing a disjointed loping stride and comportment.
This is Paddy.

According to friends, family and educators who have known Paddy his entire life, this is how he has always been. This is the person whom I would spend upwards of thirteen hours a day with for over a year.

* * *

I interviewed for a position in a special education program based in the wealthy Western suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. The program specialized in college-age students with varying forms of disabilities. Although the students within the program were high functioning, they were certainly not college-bound. The parents of these students wished for them to grow in independence and sought out our program for teaching both professional and life-skills. The program itself spends more time finding and overseeing jobs for our students than teaching the major school subjects inside the classroom. I had several years of teaching experience with various grades and ability ranges, but nothing in special education. Upon receiving the position in this program, and proving to my superiors that I was more than capable of doing the job adequately, I was determinded to expand my responsibilities to after school care. Instead of teaching job skills, I would now be asked to teach home and social skills to the student. I was extremely interested in doing so and interviewed with Paddy's mother for the position.

Upon first meeting Paddy's mother in her luxurious suburban home, two things struck me immediately about the family dynamic. The first being that there was no father in the immediate picture. This was notable at the time because Paddy carried within him, very few masculine qualities and exhibited several almost satirically feminine mannerisms. The second striking observation made upon my arrival into Paddy's home was the lack of evidence that he even lived there. The house was large and lovely, without a spot of clutter or mess. From seeing him in the classroom, Paddy colored on everything, marker marks everywhere, waves of crumpled papers and ripped magazines piled around his school desk. Nowhere in the house was it clear that Paddy's mother wasn't alone.

Having spent the better portion of two hours interviewing for the position, I was confident that I was to get the job. Paddy's mother Jamie appreciated both the consistency of a teacher continuing to teach even past 3 o'clock as well as having a male presence in his life, as Paddy's only real influences up until this point had been herself and various elderly females.

My job, it would seem, would be simple: I was to teach Paddy how to take care of himself; to cook, to do laundry, to shop for groceries and talk to members of society. I was to prepare him for the inevitable outcome of moving away from mother. It was understood that there are certain things Paddy cannot do and will never do. He will never go to college, nor will he ever be completely able to sustain an independent existence. The hope however, with Paddy, as with all of the students connected to our program, is that they will form a modicum of independence and socialization. And so it went for months, Paddy and I would spend our weekday afternoons traveling throughout portions of Massachusetts doing various daily tasks. Paddys mother, a kind well-to-do educator in her own right, confessed that she was too much of a pushover with her own son and scarcely demanded he do anything for himself. In surprising moments of darkness, Jamie admitted that this tendency to baby him was born both from guilt and from ignorance. She felt it her fault Paddy was born disabled and he being her only son, she admitted to not knowing how to treat him once he was diagnosed. On more than one occasion she asked that I be the bad-guy in his life. She was all too aware that she, for whatever reason, did not have it in her to enforce that which she wanted so much for her son to have, upon him.
She simply could not be tough with him.

And although maintaining the esteem of a teacher even after the final school bell rang for the day proved extraordinarily difficult, it was expected of me. What manifested in that time was a seemingly bullying relationship with Paddy. I allowed myself to become familiar and friendly with Paddy without ever becoming friends. I always maintained a teacher-student relationship with Paddy, which was far from easy, as I would occasionally be in his home seeing him off to bed, if his mother had a particularly late night at the office. This distance was what allowed me to do my job.

Spending all this time with my autistic student illustrated an often unnoticed microcosm of our society; the kind non-cynical portion of it. Our nation will go to war over oil, we will berate our own government, we will find differences between cultures living within our very borders and hate one another for those differences, but most people will treat those with disabilities with kindness. At their very worst, strangers will passively ignore those with emotional or mental disabilities, which is more than we can say about many other aspects of our society. None of this struck me as exceptional until I began talking more and more with Paddy. To put it mildly, Paddy is not a conversationalist. He has various speech impediments and trouble focusing his thoughts, added to which, Fragile X lends itself greatly to repetition of things overheard (a characteristic found similarly in certain species of parrots). So persons with Fragile X often slip into a more comfortable (as they see it: acceptable) habit of repeating things they've overheard. Therefore, to carry on a conversation with Paddy takes both patience and insistence. What I've learned from him is that this kindness shown by the general population surrounding Paddy, although well-intentioned, seems to have done more damage to Paddy than one could imagine.

Kindness from strangers usually manifests in able-bodied people doing things for our students so as not to burden our students with having to carry the tasks out themselves. The bulk of society sees a person with Down Syndrome or Aspergers as incapable and pity them for it.

What anyone working in the field of high or moderate-functioning disabilities will tell you is that they are far more clever and self-sufficient than they are given credit for. In talking with Paddy, it became clear that he greatly detested my having him expend any energy after school. If left to his own devices, he would (like any normal young adult) seclude himself in the basement of his mammoth home watching television until his mother calls him up for dinner. He would not, at the age of twenty, offer to help his mother cook the meal she prepared for him nor offer to help her clean up after him. To judge Paddy by normal 20-year-old standards, one would label him selfish, lazy and uncaring. Clearly, it isn't fair to compare Paddy to the average 20-year-old male, but I've also found it not to be completely foolhardy to do so either. In spending time with Paddy it became clear that he ceased cleaning his own dirty dishes, washing his own laundry and helping with daily chores and errands not because he was incapable, as the bulk of society believes, but because he was never challenged to do so.

His mother claimed he was unable to unlock doors with a key because of his underachieving fine motor skills, which I took to be true. Who would know better than his own mother what his capabilities are? Over time, I noticed, while in the classroom with Paddy, that he was carrying out several fine motor skilled tasks without anyone noticing. He could button his own jacket, play checkers, and file books in between one another on a bookshelf. It made me curious; I had taken the word of his mother, a self-labeled pushover, someone who had admitted a certain inability to challenge her own son. What was Paddy truly incapable of and what was he simply never challenged to do? Soon after I made it a point to have Paddy open the back door to his house using the key his mother had given me. His reaction was telling, he complained that he was not a maid and that he didn't have to do that. I had heard this reaction plenty of times before. Maids, according to Paddy, do the laundry for him, cook his dinners for him, pump gasoline into cars for him, buy his groceries for him, vacuum for him, pick up his medicine at the local drug store for him, clean his room for him; according to Paddy a maid does just about everything except watch television and listen to music for him.
A locked door was no different. It was maid's work.

Arriving at his backdoor, witnessing what was quickly becoming an abnormal temper-tantrum, several realizations were surfacing. The most prevalent being that his view of his own role in society is as much at fault for his social retardation as his autism is. The second thought was that, in a way, Paddy was correct. So far, in his first twenty years of gathered experiences, it was the maid's job to do everything for him. In his mind, he was being wronged. No one had ever challenged this person. For two decades, Paddy has lived amongst those who assume he cannot take care of himself and therefore do not bother to ask him to try. I suppose it was karma that Jamie hired a male who was not too far removed from being 20-years-old and therefore maintained tinges of lazy adolescence himself. Paddy's mother and his elderly caretakers before me, may not have a problem relegating themselves to hand servitude, but I was not about to do so for myself. Paddy could unlock that door and we would stand outside all afternoon until he proved it.

* * *

It is now the middle of spring and the doldrums of the harsh New England winter have receded. Winter in Massachusetts is for hiding and training. Our schools and houses and cars; cocoons of betterment shed only after the earth once again warms us.

Paddy has bettered himself. I've seen to this. I've seen the good people around us pity him and help him. I've watched soccer moms with handfuls of books hold the door open for Paddy despite him having nothing in his hands. I've taught him not only to say thank-you for such kindness but in the future, to reverse it by holding the door open himself for those same soccer moms. I've watched his employers pat him on the shoulder for a job well done only to redo his sloppy workmanship once he turns his back. I've taught those same employers to show Paddy the respect of being treated as an equal, to demand that he do the job they pay him to do, to do the job he is absolutely capable of doing. I've taught Paddy that he doesn't get a free pass at work anymore. I've become his parent, not by blood, but by responsibility. I've become the bad cop. The enforcer. And what very few people seem to grasp is that because of this, I have become his greatest ally.

I cannot imagine what pain and anguish Jamie must go through from day-to-day, what guilt she must feel or what frustration she has relegated to normalcy. I am not so smug as to berate her for the job she has done with her son, nor would I ever presume to be a better parent or a better influence than anyone else. People become lazy however. They flee toward their comfort zones and rarely deviate from them. They make mistakes born from fear and from hesitancy, not from dispassion. My only claim is that, in this instance, I have no comfort zones. There is nothing about Paddy that is comfortable to me. Added to which, I am being paid to be both fearless and non-hesitant. I am being paid to watch Paddy prepare his own dinner. I am being paid to teach Paddy to shop for his own groceries, clean his own room, open his own doors, and complete his own tasks.

I write to you now, not because we live in a world of heartlessness, but because we live in a world of wrongheaded thoughtfulness. The Paddys of the world can do infinitely more than you assume they can. If nothing else, the Paddys of the world are clever enough to know if they hesitate long enough, some kind soul will do their bidding for them. I ask that you give the Paddys of this world your care, your patience, your understanding, but not your elbow grease, not your sweat and not your muscle. I ask that if you assist the Paddys of the world at some point in your daily routine that you teach them how to fish instead of handing them something from your own catch basket.

And when you arrive at your own doorstep, wait for the Paddys of the world to unlock the door themselves, as I assure you, they will.



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