My first thought was: You ridiculous woman. Clutching your clipboard, telling me my four-year-old is “on the spectrum.” I flinched every time she said the word, the one I still have trouble using. I imagined my son decades later, living in a group home, a middle-aged man still playing with his beloved trains, running the wheels on a stained formica table-top, crouched down and squinting. My second thought was: You ridiculous man! Staring blankly ahead, treating this woman’s careful and considered analysis like a death sentence instead of what it was: an offer to help. One year later, my thoughts pace back and forth on their own spectrum, one that runs from “I have no idea what will happen” to “everything is probably going to be fine.” I’m hoping to get rid of the lingering “probably” any day now.
Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome is dead. At some point in the near future it will be deleted. In the meantime feel free to poke around its perfectly preserved corpse.
My first thought was: You ridiculous woman. Clutching your clipboard, telling me my four-year-old is “on the spectrum.” I flinched every time she said the word, the one I still have trouble using. I imagined my son decades later, living in a group home, a middle-aged man still playing with his beloved trains, running the wheels on a stained formica table-top, crouched down and squinting. My second thought was: You ridiculous man! Staring blankly ahead, treating this woman’s careful and considered analysis like a death sentence instead of what it was: an offer to help. One year later, my thoughts pace back and forth on their own spectrum, one that runs from “I have no idea what will happen” to “everything is probably going to be fine.” I’m hoping to get rid of the lingering “probably” any day now.