Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

Everyone who knows me, knows I don’t really like the holidays. I like them less than my birthday, and to be honest, I’d love to go somewhere remote and secluded from a week before Halloween until a week after New Years. I get argument after argument about this, so lets just accept it as fact. I try never to hamper anyone’s good time, I guess I just have too many hang ups to enjoy it all.

Tomorrow I think will be the most difficult Thanksgiving I’ve faced for quite sometime. My life is nowhere near where I’d like it to be. I’m broke, out of work, on the edge of giving up the freedom that I had decided to get back into my life, and 1,500 miles away from the person I want to be with.

Yeah, it’s gonna be a bleak day, inside of a bleak month, buried in a bleak winter.

But I’ll have my kids. My boys. The two greatest things that have ever happened to me. I’ve forgotten a lot in life but I like to think that even when I close my eyes for the last time, I’ll remember the exact seconds that I held them both for the first time.

Needless to say, I take a lot of photos of my kids. To begin with, they’re easy targets. They’re my flesh & blood so there’s no way they tell me stop anyway. Jack hides from me now, but I manage to catch him when he’s not looking. James… well James tolerates me. He’s started to play with my camera, but he still has trouble working the buttons. My mother got a new camera recently and we gave the old one to the boys. James especially loves it, he takes photos of all sorts of things, and I love seeing what he sees. He’ll be better than me someday. The interesting thing about that is he’s named after my Grandfather, James Killeen, who was a great photographer who passed his talent to my mom, who passed some of it to me.

So tomorrow will be another day of tickles, playing on the floor, goofing off, and me hitting the bed exhausted after them both wearing me out. I’ll sleep good. I tend to briefly forget my woes for the time being, even if it’s just for a few minutes while I play “I spy” with Jack or James is sitting on my lap. Sure things are pretty crappy right now, but Jack and James are still smiling, and they both still say “I love you daddy.”

Happy Thanksgiving.

More of my boys on my Flickr…

Joy In The Playground

It’s a difficult thing to go most places with class of children on the autistic spectrum, but the Queens Science Museum was probably one the most ill-conceived and poorly executed trips I had ever been a part of. To expect five to seven year old autistic children to be even mildly interested in concepts that quite frankly bore older mainstream children was simply ludicrous.

But like the say, when handed lemons, right…?

So we ate lunch in the cafeteria, which was a timed affair, BTW, since there were so many schools there that day. The teachers huddled and all of them saw this as going south really badly of we were to stick with the museum plan. I was called in because I was the only one from the area. I suggested a few ideas, but then someone noticed a small playground across the street. We were all in agreement, so once the children were done eating, we all marched out the museum doors (“No return admittance!!”) to the playground.

The rest of the day was spent forgetting about the science of the how and why and just living in the reality of a sprinkler, jungle gym and slides. Since there was already one teacher or para for every child (and me) all the kids got individual attention. It was so warm out that soon almost all the children were in the sprinkler. I played with James on the jungle gym where he climbed to the highest perch like the monkey he is. We rested at the top and I began shooting.

I took several shots that day, most of which can be seen here in slideshow form.

The shot though that most consider to be the shot of the day is the one I call “Joy”

This one, as in all of the shots of that day, is of a child experience the unique summer time fun that seems to fall away when you grow older. Something about a child and water just leads to pure happiness.

To me though, the real joy in that playground that day was the fact that for a few hours they were just kids. For a short time they had broken the chains of autism and were speaking in the immortal language of just having fun.

I’ve been asked if the subject in the photo above had autism and the answer is yes. I saw him at school awhile later and he was having such a rough day he had a pressure vest on. He was screeching and wouldn’t get on the elevator. He was lost in the sucky world of his condition. However, I knew somewhere inside him was the same joy that was on his face that day.

Maybe all he needed was a sprinkler.