Meteors, Dyslexia, Tea Baggers and Lemonade

So, it's Sunday. I read about meteors flying over the mid-West, and Ted Cruz, the heinous Tea Bagger senator from Texas who won't give up his paycheck if the government is shut down but thinks it's all right that 800,000 soldiers will have theirs frozen. I fostered a pretty spirited debate on Facebook about the merits of the Affordable Care Act, and how it's going to help so many of us despite its problems. I feel nervous that the Tea Baggers are going to prevail and wish they'd all calm down and let the reform play out. I'm weary of the people who constantly whine about how our political discourse has disintegrated and wish they'd stop whining and say something in addition to how our political discourse has disintegrated. And yes, I'm perfectly aware that it's the Tea Party and not the Tea Baggers. They'll always be tea baggers to me, and I don't give a damn if it's offensive.

 Oliver is outside hawking lemonade again and cupcakes, this time, in an effort to raise money for fishing supplies and the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Los Angeles. I had a talk last night with a friend's boyfriend who told me about his fascinating youth, growing up in Nebraska, how he was always in trouble, on the road, really, to jail,  his unruly behavior in part due to what was later determined to be dyslexia. It all turned out fine -- more than fine -- and that turning out happened when he learned of his strengths, not his deficits, when his mother persevered, when he made drastic and dramatic changes in his life. I'm reading a book by Ben Foss called The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan, and it's illuminating. Sometimes, when I read Foss' descriptions of himself in childhood, I feel as if I'm reading about Oliver, and little by little my gut instincts about my remarkable child are affirmed. When Oliver was young -- let's say three or four -- he was already such a pistol, as my father would say, that we would shake our heads and laugh, ruefully. A neighbor who has a powerful job in publicity once told me that she is always nice to Oliver because one day we're all going to be working for him. The book is not about overcoming learning disabilities but finding one's strengths and recognizing that dyslexia -- disability -- is just part of one's identity, something to accept, to almost embrace. Simple -- but radical -- stuff.  I think, sometimes, that part of my job with Oliver is to literally get him through school and out, to support him in whatever way I can and to guide him to constantly see his strengths and pursue them.

I price my lemonade at $.75. he says. Because most people will give me a dollar and tell me to keep the change.

So, Ted Cruz? Overcome him like a disease. Oliver? Help him to accept his dyslexia and discover his strengths.

What's up with you, Reader?

I Limoni

Oliver's text to me this morning
I'm in blue and he's in yellow.

Oliver squeezed lemons again this morning and assembled his lemonade stand at the corner of our street. Today's proceeds went, in part, to the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Los Angeles. which is our way to make quite literal lemonade out of lemons. Sophie is struggling with near constant seizures these days, and I'm willfully stoic in my witness. This doesn't mean I don't die a bit inside at every bad day. Sophie's eyes implore, and it's a chip chip chipping away at the larger than life-sized boulder that is moi. This afternoon, both Henry and Oliver participated as volunteers with a baseball team made up of kids with special needs. Sophie and I sat in the bleachers with a couple of friends and cheered the kids on. I felt a supreme lassitude, which I imagine is due to the years I've spent in Seizure Land. Some days it's like that, more lemons than lemonade. The weird thing is that I adore lemons and don't particularly like lemonade.

The Lemon Trees

Listen, the poets laureate
walk only among plants of unfamiliar name: boxwood, acanthus;
I, for my part, prefer the streets that fade
to grassy ditches where a boy
hunting the half-dried puddles
sometimes scoops up a meager eel;
the little paths that wind along the slopes,
plunge down among the cane-tufts,
and break into the orchards, among trunks
     of the lemon-trees.
Better if the jubilee of birds
is quenched, swallowed entirely in the blue:
more clear to the listener murmur of friendly
     boughs
in air that scarcely moves,
that fills the senses with this odor
inseparable from earth,
and rains an unquiet sweetness in the breast.
Here by a miracle is hushed
the war of the diverted passions,
here even to us poor falls our share of riches,
and it is the scent of the lemon-trees.

See, in these silences
in which things yield and seem
about to betray their ultimate secret,
sometimes one half expects
to discover a mistake of Nature,
the dead point of the world, the link which
     will not hold,
the thread to disentangle which might set us 
     at last
in the midst of a truth.
The eyes cast round,
the mind seeks harmonizes disunites
in the perfume that expands
when day most languishes.
Silences in which one sees 
in each departing human shadow
some dislodged Divinity.
But the illusion wanes and time returns us
to our clamorous cities where the blue
     appears
only in patches, high up, among the gables.
Then rain falls wearying the earth,
the winter tedium weighs on the roofs,
the light grows miserly, bitter the soul.
When one day through a half-shut gate,
among the leafage of a court
the yellows of the lemon blaze
and the heart's ice melts
and songs 
pour into the breast
from golden trumpets of solarity.

Eugenio Montale, Selected Poems

How We Do It, Part XXXII in a Series: Inappropriate Parenting

Oliver and I took a walk down La Brea to the Goodwill Store. I pushed Sophie, and Oliver rode his skateboard. It was abominably hot. I hate Goodwill stores, but I have grown a boy inside my belly who not only hates to read but lives to go through junk and then collect it. We wandered through the Goodwill, and I effectively persuaded Oliver not to purchase a photo of  Mike Piazza, the former Dodgers player who my older son later claimed took drugs. The photo cost $10 which I told Oliver was way too high for such a thing, and even though he wanted to buy it with his money that he'd earned by setting up and selling the world's best lemonade yesterday (a shocking $83 take!), I told him, no, that's not a smart purchase, at all. For once in his short dozen years on the planet, he listened to me, but he also left the store considerably more surly than when we entered, and since it was still boiling hot outside, and Sophie was humming in her wheelchair, crossing and uncrossing her legs in what appeared to be discomfort as well as emanating a highly suspicious smell, I, too, felt grumpy. When we rolled past the giant plate glass window of a fabric store, behind which sat two plump girls sitting on a couch in air-conditioned splendor, the glass nearly shattered from their baleful stares at Sophie in her wheelchair. I mouthed at them to STOP STARING in my sternest voice, and Oliver looked at me and said that he felt like giving them the finger and I said, Go ahead, and he looked at me and I looked forward so I didn't see whether he'd taken me up on it.

Sometimes you've just got to give in, Mom, Oliver said.

And I agreed.

Saturday

Oliver is selling lemonade at the corner today for $.75 a glass. He squeezed the lemons last night at 11:00 and made simple syrup with The Husband. He wondered if Henry might go door-to-door and take orders and then deliver, but Henry, being Henry, said, Nah, I don't like working like that. So, he's in his room, playing video games or watching violent movies with lots of sex.

Just kidding.

Sophie is having a sleep-fest which she does periodically and which I believe is her body's way to cope with a period of particularly brutal and multiple seizures. I periodically poke my head over the door and watch to see whether her chest is rising and falling, and then I feel somewhat sheepish to still be doing that and then I realize that it's perfectly reasonable given our situation and Sophie's troubles and then I wonder, for a bit, if I'm irrevocably damaged and then I realize that we all are in one way or another but that life just keeps on blowing its breezes and throwing its lemons and pushing out mint.

It's another beautiful day in Los Angeles. I'm going to finish The Interestings and start on The Mouse-Proof Kitchen by Saira Shah. It's a novel about a couple living in southern France with a disabled child, and I believe the writer herself has a child with seizures. I know that someone (maybe here?) told me about Saira Shah a long time ago, and I pre-ordered the book on Amazon. It was downloaded to my Kindle the other day, and just this morning I read a review. I also might finish spray-painting two metal chairs that I picked up at a yard sale and that I'm working on, slowly, ever so slowly, because, really, I'm more like Henry when it comes to that kind of thing and would rather say Nah, I don't like working like that. As for sex and violence, I prefer the former.

Reader, how is your Saturday shaping up and what are you reading?

Cupcakes and Lemonade Stands

Key Lime Cupcake Batter

Key Lime Cupcakes with Key Lime Cream Cheese Frosting

Vanilla Cupcakes with Lavender Frosting

Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting

Chocolate Cupcakes with White Frosting

Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Frosting

Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Thank you, Kristin!

Oliver is wearing a Wendy's fast food jacket and hat that we found in the house when we moved in. Just so you know...

Total Take: $24.56