"Aye, there's the rub"

When I was a child, I had an electric analog clock. It was white and boxy. It had a gold wire that you pulled out in the back to set the alarm.  The alarm sound was a buzzer mixed with a fire alarm mixed with an electric shock. When it woke me up, it jolted me out of bed with my heart racing and my mind filled with fear.  Waking suddenly, especially in the dark, leaves me disoriented. I startle easily.

I think it is for this reason that I stopped allow myself being woken up by alarms - never again would allow myself to be startled during the night.  Now I watch them throughout the night and anticipate them. I must have a clock with me in the room when I sleep. I need to watch it I need to always know where I am in the course of the night at all times. I wake in the night, check the time, and go back to sleep. I set the alarm at bedtime, to symbolically represent the end of my journey. But I only sleep lightly, especially the last two hours. I snooze myself for an hour anticipating the alarm time, and then shut it off a minute before.

I have always had poor sleep, as long as I can remember. I have always awoken without feeling refreshed.  I have double black bags under my eyes that never go away. I can remember my teacher in high school saying that I shouldn't be this tired.

When I was in high school, I slept in a room in the basement without any windows. Today, a room like this would have been considered against code. There was no way to synchronize my sleep with the natural world. I had to work extra hard to sleep and wake in a place like this.

My father snored very loudly. He knew it because he talked about the remedies of his day, such as sewing a small round object into the back of one's pajama top. I mentioned once before that my father remarried, to an impractical actress. Before the separation, the first sign of trouble in the marriage that I remember, other than dismissing the maid, was my father being banished to another bedroom for his loud snoring.

I have always snored very loudly.  My children used to put a towel under the bedroom door. When camping, others in the next tent referred to me as the Bear.

As long as I can remember, I have been quick to spring to action on rising, but lacking in that quality of feeling rested. I have always had that quality of sleeping with one eye open. This came in handy during the infancy of my three children - that I could arise to tend them in the night almost instantly.  I am on alert in the night.

I have adapted to the reality of being unrested by keeping myself stimulated - by being busy and anxious and nervous. I can't sit still for very long. I am restless. I must be up and about, engaged with busy work. Otherwise I fall asleep where I sit.

This behavior of falling asleep in inappropriate public places is called low sleep-onset latency. I can remember in high school and college of the early 80's having the squiggly scrawl crash line in my notes, where I had dozed off in the middle of writing.  After I started employment my managers were commenting on my visible sleep-crashes in meetings.

I can recall in 1990 when the president of our company came to our site to speak to the team. I was so excited to see him that I came to the room early to sit up front. However this proved my undoing as I feel asleep in front of him while he was speaking. I received a good talking-to after that.

At home, I cannot sit through an entire movie non-stop without standing up. I start to feel sleepy and sick and weak if I don't get up and move every fifteen minutes or so. I am always working around the house, if after 10p, to find some little chore to do like doing laundry or the dishes.

There's always more work to be done. I can't rest. Or else.

In addition to the falling-asleep incidents at work, and the snoring, my partner said that I gasped for air while sleeping. She said that I would stop breathing, then gasp suddenly, then fall back asleep.  This is a tragic thing to have to happen to someone over and over in their sleep and they don't even know it.  This is known as sleep apnea.

I started going to the sleep disorder center in the 1990's. It was there that I had my first overnight sleep study. A sleep study is like having an EKG, but with more electrodes. My first study was not wholly definitive, with the diagnosis of idiopathic hypersomnia.  This is an increased tendency toward sleepiness for an unspecific reason.

The number of gasping incidents is measured by the AHI. My number was nineteen, which is in the moderate range.  I was prescribed a CPAP machine which provides pressured airflow into my throat through a mask.

My sleep doctor said years later that if he had known of my bipolor disorder, he would have diagnosed my condition differently. Bipolor disorder can affect sleep, but also good sleep hygiene can manage the occurrence of manias.

http://bipolar.about.com/cs/sleep/a/0002_mood_sleep.htm

My first sleep study was in a cluster of rooms built into the below-ground parking garage of the hospital. Inside the lab there were control rooms with EKG machines for monitoring, hotel bedrooms for sleeping, and technicians awake all night for operating the study.  As I was being escorted down the halls, I remarked that this ought to be a magical, mysterious place: the place where dreams were made. The techs looked at me like I should try working the night-shift.

Sleep studies do not monitor dreams. They monitor the cycles of sleep, in which dreaming may occur.  Dreaming is associated with the REM phase, but dreaming does occur during other phases as well. The technicians do not see the dreams, nor can they control them. My dreams are mine. When I awake the operator asks me whether I dreamed.

There is something spooky about having someone watch you while you sleep.

Sleep studies remind me of the great novel by Ursula K. Leguin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven

The PBS film adaption of the novel is also excellent.

One of the powerful images from the novel that has always stuck with me is the association of sleeping deeply and sinking deeply into the ocean.  We drop deeper and deeper into the depths.  It becomes darker and more mysterious. What is it like to float there? What is it that we see?

In the novel, we question what is the relation between dreaming and our reality?  Could this reality we experience be but the fevered dream of another tortured soul?  And can our dreaming or stopping dreaming really change the future?  Is it a different world after dreaming?

For me, one important lesson I have learned is the need for letting go and letting sleep. I tend to focus and hold thoughts and concerns in my mind, over and over in a loop. Sometimes I sleep a shallow sleep because I don't want to let these thoughts go.  I hold yesterday in my mind and prevent it from passing.

Suppose you were to pull an all-nighter. Would the next day be the next day, for you?  No, it would be hour 25 of yesterday. When you pulled that all-nighter, you held yesterday and retained yesterday's reality across the night. Now today is yesterday again.

Now suppose instead that you had gone to sleep. The day you did awake to would have been a new day, with an updated sense of priorities and perceptions.  You would perceive the new day for what it is. You would have forgotten the hot mental state of yesterday, and would be assembling a new today based only on what is salient.

Here is a proverb on sleep:

"The wise man doesn't go to sleep when he's tired, he goes to sleep when he's sleepy".




 

Panic and Anxiety

My first signs of panic were in my senior year of college. I remember losing the ability to squeeze the muscles in my armpits. There was so much tension in my upper arms that they went numb. I was very concerned about what this could mean. I didn't allow myself to go to the doctor at that time, so there was no way to have it checked. I remember walking across the Quad thinking: please hold me together until graduation. Please don't let me die now.

My first full-on panic attack came in the summer of 1985 before I left for graduate school in California.  During that summer, I worked as a summer intern for a computer company during the day, and then I worked at writing my own computer game at night. I stayed up until eleven each time typing furiously, fueled by caffeine. I was afraid I was not effective at my day job, and I was afraid that the game wasn't complete and fulfilling my high expectations for it. I came back to the house I was staying, one night in Aug and tried to get to sleep. I lay in bed and felt a kind of shock or shudder or jolt every few minutes. Just when I would start to doze I would be shocked awake. My heart was already racing from the caffeine and the concentration and racing thoughts. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was afraid to go to sleep because something would happen. I would sit up in bed and wait for the shakes to stop.  I was exhausted that next day. But I also became intolerant to caffeine: I couldn't drink any without feelings of fear and panic.

I'll go back to an earlier time to recall my feelings of anxiety. I think most of my anxiety is about not feeling safe. I have no family. I have no safety net.  I live on a thin line that could break at any time. I am exposed to danger. Anything could go wrong and I'd have no recourse. There is no one to help me. I can only depend on myself

I think my earliest feelings of insecurity date back to 1974, when my parents divorce was final. My mother was institutionalized and we moved to New Hampshire with my father. My father was an educated man and a good provider and he was there for the children when he could. My siblings and I became latch-key children and bear responsibility at an early age. At that time, my father the doctor was only available through an answering service. As the oldest I was responsible for holding things together at home. If my younger siblings were fighting, I had no recourse but to settle it until my father could come home. I was anxious that our home-life would be all right and safe.

I have mentioned in another post that I was present in 1979 where my father lay dying on the basement couch and that I rode with our neighbor the doctor to the hospital. I think it was during that time that I again feared for whom would take care of me.  My siblings and I were eventually taken in by father's sister, who we children did not know well at the time. But in that interval just after my father's death, I was unsure what was to become of us.

In the late summer of 1979 I was entering my junior year in high school. The setting was this: my father had passed away in August, my Aunt had three new kids to care for, her house was too small for her family and ours, the funds from our trust were not yet disbursed, we had only a month before school started, and our house needed to be made ready for sale. Being responsible, I made an audacious proposal: let me stay in the house on my own and take care of it. My sister, being the youngest, went back to my Aunt's home while my brother, the middle child, went to stay with a family nearby.

Looking back on that fall, it is what I don't remember that surprises me. I don't remember sleeping in that house. I don't remember eating there or shopping for food. I walked to school as always but I don't remember it. There was a neighbor who looked after me and fed me and washed my clothes. I don't know how I survived during that time. It was a lonely and deprived situation, but my physical needs were taken care of. I wasn't physically hurt. I recall that there was an estate sale for our belongings. I helped bag and tag the many items of my father's which we couldn't take.  I lived alone there for two and one-half months.

Returning the late summer of 1985, I was nervous about graduate school in California, especially since I had gotten it in my head to drive myself across the country. I had purchased a used car for myself at the last minute and I didn't know its reliability.  As I drove across the country on I-80, I remember lying awake in the hotel rooms wondering if I would survive the night. I would feel the same sort of jolting-awake shocks, and all I could do was to sit up, back to the wall, in the dark, and hope it would pass. I imagined dying in the hotel room, with no one to find me but the maid. I survived each day and made it to San Francisco without incident.

When I arrived at graduate school, I felt there was something terribly wrong with me. I was nervous and scared and had heart palpitations. I was truly afraid that I was going to need to be hospitalized. Although I never did go to the doctor's generally, I made an appointment at the campus clinic. The story I gave the doctor was a disorganized, guilt-ridden tale of how I must have had a bad lifestyle to hurt myself and I was afraid I was irreparably ill.  The doctor gave me an EKG. When he saw it was normal, he sent me on my way.

Hypographia

Hypergraphia is an intense desire to write.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraphia
I have bipolar disorder. I have also taken stimulants such as Ritalin to treat attention and alertness issues.
I have always been a detailed, technical, thoughtful and analytical writer. I learned to touch type early and can type quickly. In my work as a computer troubleshooter, I often thought through writing. I would often generate long emails for a single subject to a single recipient.

When I started being in a manic state, I would write in a manic state. I often thought during those times that I saw patterns and truths that others did not see. If I read in the manic state, I would often start scribbling frantically in the margins as I made associations. Many of my favorite books are disfigured in this way.  It is funny and sad to see the scrawls.

Later, as the mania became more intense, I would stay up all night thinking intensely. Perhaps I would crash before dawn for a few hours rest, or I would be up into the next day. Typically that next day I would feel horrible. Some of the worst feelings I have ever felt: exhausted, fearful, hopeless and sick. That day I would have to clean up my mess from the night before. And sometimes I would have to go to work and pretend like I was fine.  But very consistently, toward the evening of the second day, I would have a burst of Hypergraphia.  I sometimes likened this burst to throwing up. It is as if I had consumed various ideas and writings during the previous day, then stayed up all night churning my brain, then the next day have a distillation regurgitated forth.

It was the pages of scrawling hand-text that finally tipped off one doctor that I needed to see a psychiatrist for a mood disorder.

Being also a compulsive keeper of my every written page, I saved and organized my hyper graphic work into what is now ten binders, each two inches thick.  I feel it is going to be a great challenge to find anything useful in this.

I have found that mania is a wonderful thing. I feel that, when you are manic, your thoughts associate much more readily and feedback much more quickly between themselves. You are able to develop and hold marvelous theories, and you are able to reinforce your private beliefs much more easily. But the problem with manic thoughts is that they make little sense or have little utility when shown to the outside world. In short, manic thoughts and theories are not understandable or useful to others, who do not share the heightened, abstracted mental context in which they were formed.

How do you make anything out of 1000 pages of navel-gazing?

I like the early writing of Phillip K. Dick. His creative ideas have been the basis of many SF movies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_K_Dick
He may have suffered from substance abuse and mental health issues.
He developed a detailed inner mythology, which he captured on paper in periods of Hypergraphia.
After his death, these notes were compiled by researchers into a book called the Exegesis.
I have a copy of this book. It is wonderful, awe-inspiring and completely impenetrable. One would have to read over 900 pages and master his idiosyncratic language to understand him; and then have the task of finding meaning that could apply to the real world.

My Hypergraphia has stopped. I still like to write. I do a fair amount of writing in my job. The difference is that now I only write what the other person needs me to write. I don't write more than what is necessary. I have realized that my reader only has energy to consume just the text that they need and no more.  This isn't an imaginary scenario where I write whatever I want and my reader reads every word and welcomes and acts on every additional thought I include.  In the real world I am concise and actionable. No one has the extra stimulated energy to do otherwise.




 

Asperger's Syndrome: it's not a bug, its a feature

It was in 2004 that I learned I had Asperger's Syndrome. There was a feature in the Sunday Seattle Times. I had one of those moments of self-identification when you realize you are looking at yourself. I was 40 years old.

You can read about it for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome.

I think it is interesting that Asperger's Syndrome is named after an Austrian doctor who documented child patients in 1944. I am constantly amazed by the sophistication of weapons and technology of the German empire as evidenced during WWI and especially WWII. Is there a connection?

I also think it is interesting that the condition did not receive a standardized diagnosis until the mid-1990's. What is it about this cluster of diagnosable conditions that resists easy recognition? I'll offer some thoughts on this later in the article.

There is some comfort in having a name for what you have, or who you are. There is some relief in knowing its not just me, that I'm not just a failure for no reason at all. It gives me part of the answer to the question I have asked myself over and over: why is everything so hard? It makes me sad for myself, to recall all the struggle and shame and humiliation and inexplicable under-performance that went undiagnosed from birth. It is my wish that early childhood diagnosis and intervention may help other children to grow up properly treated and accommodated.

It is sixth grade. The teachers do not understand why I walk around the edge of the playground by myself, looking at the trees, imaging they are pipes or alien machines.

It is junior high. The gym teacher takes attendance. I dread my name coming up because I know I will have to speak. Do I say Yes or Here? The gym teacher makes us run laps around the yard. I throw up on the locker room floor.  Later, the gym teacher makes us do a routine on the balance beam. I fail the maneuvers and fall off. Later, the gym teacher calls me into his office and forces me to read a poem above not quitting.

It is high school. I am to play baseball with the class. I take my turn at bat and strike out. And again. I am not able to coordinate my swing with the ball. It is humiliating.

The most chilling thing to me about the Asperger's Syndrome traits is how spot-on they are.

• Difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication
• restrictive, repetitive patterns of behavior and interest
• preservation of linguistic and cognitive development
• physical clumsiness
• atypical use of language

Social Interaction

It is the time between sixth and seventh grade during the summer. I realize there are other people. Until that time, there was only the house I lived in, my father (when he was present due to being a single-parent and a Doctor), and my brother and sister to the extent I needed to take care of them and mediate their fighting. There are people besides me. I just noticed them.

In Junior High I realized that I exist. Which is to say I realized that I existed as being perceived by some other alive things, although still largely irrelevant. I was teased and mocked on a regular basis. I did not know, until I was put down, that there was a properly masculine way to carry one's books. I was mocked for not knowing that there was a Super Bowl and who was playing.

I realize now that, by and large, other people do not exist for me. It is as if I am invisible, or that I think I am invisible to them and they cannot see me and harbor important thoughts about me.  It is also that other people are like manikins to me: empty scarecrows that are placed in the seats of the class room. Aside from the mocking, there wouldn't have been much difference if I attended a school completely by myself.  Because I did.

In class I am a good student. But I do not care at all what other people think. Sometimes I shake things up just to be different or a show-off.  In class we are each asked to name an example of an exclamation. When it is my turn, I yell "AARRG!". When asked to create a sentence to be diagramed, I write: "Every globule of gaseous moisture has an inner luster of a metallic hue". [the first half isn't the original quote, but you get the idea].

I have no dates. I don't got to prom. I have no friends, except for two physics nerds like myself.  I don't care. I go home and do my homework and read.

I have no emotional connection between my one brief girlfriend, between ninth and tenth grade. I am sitting in the dark with her discussing Love. I tell her something like, there is no Love, or I have no Love, or I how can I know what Love is. She is crying and I feel misunderstood.

Restricted and Repetitive interests and Behaviors

It is 1971, outside Boston MA. I am watching re-runs of Star Trek, Gilligan's Island and the Wild, Wild West. While doing so, I am playing with Lego's. But I never build anything. I simply categorize the shapes and colors. Or if I must build something, I build a cube or a pyramid. I am more interested in what the types of the pieces are, than using them to build anything.

Soon, I have seen and memorized every episode of Star Trek. My favorite episodes are The Doomsday Machine and the Galileo Seven.  But there are many more. I know all the plots, the parts of the ship, and the guest stars. To this day I often surprise people with my ability to name the title or describe the alien in a given episode. There is an homage to the episode Arena in the move Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey.

It is 1976 and I am 13. It is seventh grade. At that time it was rare to have any kind of computer in a Junior High, much less a mini-computer (half way between a mainframe and a PC [which didn't exist yet]). Actually, the first year, the school has a kind of giant pre-calculator, called for its manufacturer, Olivetti. I am able to write a primitive program, getting the machine to count down in a loop. The next year, our math teacher accomplishes an amazing acquisition and we have a working Digital Equipment PDP-8/E with high speed paper tape reader, a real video terminal (only 12 lines) and 4 noisy teletypes [like a VW bug crossed with a typewriter]. I was the chief assistant. I could do a cold start of the computer by toggling in the bootstrap sequence. I could start the software called "Multi-User BASIC" by configuring the about of memory (16K? 32K? 12-bit words). I knew all of the BASIC code for all of the games we had, and liked to tinker with them.

In 1979 at the age of 15, on a lark, I type up a resume on a typewriter and send it in to Digital Equipment Corp. The resume and cover letter are forwarded to their internship program. I receive a summer job programming for the amount of $5/hour. I develop simple database applications for their quality department. I am surrounded in the internship by college students.

Speech and Language

Frequently I have difficulty answering the right question. The trigger which caused me to write this essay was one of my Doctors asking me if I liked to write. I answered that I sometimes write at work. And back a few years ago when I was manic, I had hypergraphia and filled a whole box of journals with thoughts and feelings.  He went on anyway, and said that, since I was able to articulate my conditions so clearly, perhaps I should write them down. Oh, he was just asking if I would like to write something!

Often when I am asked a question, I over anticipate what the asker might have in mind. Do I need to defend myself? Am I in trouble?  Does the person asking have the historical context? Does the person asking know that their question has multiple subtle interpretations? Or that there could be multiple answers depending on their time and resources involved?  Did they ask the right question? Should I reword it for them? All these things run through my head and cause me to respond with To Much Information.

 One of my favorite examples preoccupation with Jargon is a collection of slang from the computer culture of the 1970's. It was called The Hacker's Dictionary. http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
I studied the Hacker's Dictionary. I liked reading the Hacker's Dictionary just for being a dictionary. In the era from 1978-85, I knew people who worked on the college mainframes or worked on them myself. At that time, hacker speech was a normal part of our vocabulary. I liked to slip hacker phrases into my everyday life. Such as "he's some RANDOM guy from the English department" or "I can't PARSE that" or "We're going to LOSE BIG here".   I liked "bogus", "canonical", "feature", "hack" (high praise) and of course "kludge" (disrespected insult).  You might say that hacker culture was a dialect and its own private world, and I loved to live it and use it, even in the outside world.

Motor and Sensory Perception

It was 2007, at the age of 44, when I realized that I hated water. Or that the feeling of water was painful to me. Or that the minutest difference in the temperature of water causes me extreme amplified feelings of the stimuli. I remember as a child being distrustful of the shower because of its fickle behavior, having a handle whose meaning changed depending on what room you were in. How you had to work to adjust it just so, and then having the temperature jolt high or low at a whim while it was running.

It is 1971 and I am to take swimming lessons in the local lake. I am told to walk out on the dock and jump in the water. I do this and the water feels like needles, extremely cold, like being plunged into ice water or being shocked. It is painful to make this transition quickly. And I do it again, day after day.

It is the 1990's and I am still married and raising my children. My children love the water. Some of my children find the water soothing, and quite enjoy taking a bath. I never take a bath: I don't lie how it feels and the disturbing signals. When we travel, I take the job of chaperoning the children in the pool. In each case, it takes my body five minutes to acclimate. My children have already jumped in without a moment's thought. Five minutes for the pool. Twenty minutes to get all the way into a hot tub.

 I am very sensitive to noise. I cannot study or read if there is any music or distracting talking going on. I used to have to ask my roommate to wear headphones while playing his music while I was studying. Sometimes, I had to ask him still to turn down the volume because I could hear the sound in the headphones. At home, there is only a small range of volume at which the TV can be set at, or otherwise it disturbs me greatly. Even if I am not in the room, the ambient noise of something that is too loud bothers me to the point where I can't be in the house.

The processing of sound is also different for me. When we are driving and the traffic gets complex, I turned down the radio so I can think more. I cannot understand people when I am in a cocktail-party or noisy environment. I cannot easily discern the speech from the noise.  It upsets me greatly if multiple people are having separate conversations near me.

One interesting thing I've noticed when watching movies is that I get more out of them if I watch them with the English subtitles (or closed-captioning hard of hearing-impaired) turned on. It seems as if the depth and appreciation of the movie increases by a third or more. I realize that with me, even though I hear spoken words, they don't fully sink in or register. I think sometimes that even though I can hear, I am actually deaf in terms of fully decoding human speech. I don't understand what people say and I miss a lot of the nuance. I wish that everyday interactions in the world were subtitled!

 Late diagnosis

I asked a question at the start of the essay: why was it that Asperger's Syndrome was recognized as a standard diagnosis only in the mid-1990's, when presumably the condition has existed since the 1940's (and probably before)?

I don't know what the answer is, but I am offer this thought. When you look at the defining criteria for Asperger's Symptoms, they are categorical, that is symptoms for a symptom. Take "restrictive, repetitive pattern of interest and behavior". It doesn't say "pre-occupation with trains" or "memorizes names of stars". Normally, if you look at a diagnosis for depression, say, it might say "prolonged period of sadness". It doesn't say, "prolonged period of feeling something". That is, most diagnosis are for first-level experiences that are exact and specific. Asperger's symptoms can be about anything in a particular way, that makes them special.
 

Raised In A Doctor's Office

One of my doctors suggested I write about my life experiences.

My father died on July 29, 1979. I was 16 at the time, going into my junior year.  His death came as a surprise to everyone. He had battling melanoma for several years though skin grafts and chemotherapy. But most of us assumed he was in remission. He was a dermatologist, and that summer he closed is office for the usual vacation and he came home to die alone.

I found him in the basement where it was cool lying on the couch. He told me to fetch our family friend, who was another doctor. I don't know where my brother and sister were, who were younger than me. When he arrived, we supported my father into the doctor's VW bug and we raced to the hospital. I remember the doctor flashing his headlights on and off on the highway to get people to pull over. My father was placed in intensive care.

My aunt came to watch over us children. I don't think she had been to see us there more than a handful of times, such was the relationship between my dad and his sister. I remember her receiving a phone call a few days later, and she took the receiver away from her mouth to say in a matter of fact way, "He's gone."

Not long after, my aunt asked me if I wanted to come to the hospital to say goodbye to my father. When we were there, I was shown into sterile sparse medical room with an examining table or gurney in the center. My father's dead body lay there. I can't remember of he was naked or only exposed from the waist up. He looked white and his skin tone wasn't normal anymore. I watched him for a while as expected and then we left. I was told this would bring me closure.

I don't have very good memories of my childhood. I'm not sure if that is because of my condition, or whether there were too many things I didn't want to remember.  I think my earliest memory of my father is indirect, of him and my mother fighting or there being raised voices. My mother had post-partum depression, bi-polar disorder, and alcoholism. I heard the story once that, when my mother was rushed to the hospital to give birth to one of us siblings, perhaps my sister, my father was on the golf course. I think my mother suffered in part from demanding expectations and a lack of sociable attention.

My father worked hard in those days doing his residency and lecturing. I remember him retreating on a regular basis to his den in the basement, which had a accordion partition to close him off and from which he was not to be disturbed. Although not a violent or mean man, he was demanding of perfection. I remember him becoming very angry if any of us children were to spill our milk at the table, resulting perhaps in corporal punishment.

When my father's mother was alive, we used to visit their house on Cape Cod in the summer. To us kids the grandparent adults came across as very strict and proper but very smart. The talk went right over our heads. But they weren't very affectionate. Entertainment involved competitive croquet. Looking back, what strikes me the most is my father's strategy for dealing with bathroom breaks on the trips from Boston down to the Cape. I am not making this up when I tell you my father had an empty plastic gallon ice-cream tub under the seat. We were supposed to use as a bedpan if we had to go along the way.

My father, having been raised above our grandfather's hardware store, was good with carpentry and locks and electrical work. As children we were very pleased with the homemade bunk beds he made for each of us.  A fond recollection that I shudder at now was the construction of a tree platform in a tree the yard.  He designed a flat platform that fit in the "Y" of a large tree perhaps twenty feet up. The platform was designed to accommodate the tree limbs expanding, which everyone thought was very clever. What it didn't have was walls. After it was planked, we would climb up to it by putting our feet on a series of bolts, not unlike climbing up a telephone pole.  Perhaps on the request of our mother or other prudent souls, he cluttered the elegant simplicity of the platform in sky with a rope railing around the perimeter.  Despite the obvious dangers, nothing much happened. The thing that happened, happened to me. The children were engaged in a race to see who could ascend to the platform the quickest. Somewhere near the top on the climbing spikes, I slipped and fell to land on my back. I was stunned, taken to the doctor, and ultimately found to be fine.

Both my father and mother were practical in their way. My father kept a second refrigerators in the basement with a stock of Carling Black Label beer. My mother, being also an alcoholic (or being driven to be one), would be getting into the beer. To prevent this, my father surrounded the fridge with a chain and lock, the chain being enclosed in plastic tubing. One day my father came home to find the chain sawed through: my mother having found the hack saw in the workshop.

My mother was institutionalized around 1971 with severe bi-polar disorder and went to a clinic in Belmont MA. She never fully recovered.  My father explained his reasoning for divorce to my mother's family.  In a rare ruling for that time, my father was granted full custody of the children.

In 1974 when I was 11 we moved to New Hampshire where my father started his practice. A first, my father hired a day time care-giver to watch us kids. However, evening babysitting soon became an issue as my father was dating a lot with the local divorced singles group. He devised a system of "babysitting ourselves" where we were each paid on a decreasing scale to watch ourselves.  It wasn't long before we were letting ourselves in after school and fending for ourselves until dinner. My father, being a doctor, wasn't always home on time. After I while was asked to prepare dinner two nights a week as well as look after my siblings.

Perhaps my father's greatest contribution to child-rearing was 'times'. Times were regularly scheduled appointments, usually one-half hour, to do something with father. Typically we worked backward with the youngest at 7:30, the middle child at 8:00, and my time at 8:30. Of course, in typical doctor fashion, if the prior appointments ran later, the later appointments slid. On a tough day my time might not start until 9:30. During my time I remember playing chess, reading and learning to pay cribbage. To his great credit, my father as the doctor always kept his appointments.

On a side note about chess, he taught me a principal that says with me to this day. I was never, and still am not, much of a chess player. My mind just doesn't work like that. But he would let me win, or almost win. I remember having several pieces remaining, and him having only his king. I said that I win. He said that you have to mate the king. So I moved a piece, and he moved his king out of the way. I chased his king all over the board but he would move the king each time. He said the game was a draw unless I could pin the king. He eventually hinted to me how to do it, and the game was over.  Being in the computer field today, it is the core principal of an computer algorithm that it must finish.

One of the saddest stories about my father was his re-marriage. If my father is anything like me, his ability to detect people's faces is triggered especially by bright faces. What I mean by that average women was average faces are ok, but women's faces which are larger than life, brighter than life, have an usual attraction and power over us. My father had brought home women he had dated from the divorced singles group before without anything really clicking. But after attending the community theatre, he started dating an impoverished actress who was lovely but very different from him. She had two children.

It seems like the courtship was a short time. Before we children knew it, we were moving to a house with seven bedrooms and six bathrooms. At my step-mother's direction, we were redecorating the house with modern 1970's style with mirrors on the walls, a sunken couch, a water bed and a full wall mural of a garden of Eden with a scantily dressed nymph. Quarters were prepared for a live in maid, and it seems now that my step-mother was set for an easy time of it. After the honeymoon, I imagine reality set in. The maid was let go.  Not long after that, my father was seen sleeping in another bedroom. 

Perhaps two months after the honeymoon, my siblings and I came home from school to find that my step-mother and her children had moved out. It was a surprise.  I called my father at his office and asked him what we were going to do. He said: "go get the silverware out of the basement".

I believe that the problems I have now with attachment and side-effects of neglect come back to this upbringing.

My father was a very intelligent and hardworking man. He lived his life valuing his work and not such much other people. However in the last few years of his life he began to put people over objects, by serving in a church and giving more service. He counseled the terminally ill. The contribution I remember most however is that he volunteered to work at the VD clinic on Thurs night. I can't think of any human condition that is as close to stigma of leprosy as VD. I can only imagine that the people who attend such a clinic are despised by society.  The fact that my father would willingly and voluntarily give his time to help these troubled people is a testament to his charitable heart.