The title of Daniel Tammet’s famous book, which I’ve recently read for the first time. Daniel not only has Asperger’s, but he is also a mathematical savant. And he is a synesthesiac. This is quite a load of special endowments to land all in one individual. I envy him the synesthesia, to be honest, which I myself only have in an extremely inferior degree. I’m afraid I don’t envy him his mathematical genius, because I’m one of those rather infrequent Aspies who gets both a headache and a stomachache thinking about math. I am an Aspie of the word, and the musical note, and the visual image. But you can keep most types of numbers as far away from me as possible.

While I found the stories of Daniel’s astounding abilities fascinating, as almost anyone would, I found his writing style to be one I’ve seen in many other Aspies: somewhat rigid and step-by-step, and not very good at holding my attention, even when the subject matter is highly interesting. That made it a challenge to actually finish the book, because a writing style that leaves me flat — whether done by an Aspie or an NT — is a thing that will very often make me put down a book and never pick it up again.

Literary criticism notwithstanding, certainly everyone with Asperger’s should read this book. And every savant. And every genius of any kind. Learning how the various types of human brains work presents twists and turns and amazement of all kinds.

Daniel says any number of things that resound loudly inside my Asperger’s self, and perhaps in yours too. Here are a few of them:

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read…   Mental hell…  Spite and malice…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2010-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

Be Different is the title of John Elder Robison’s latest book. I haven’t read it, though I’ve read his first book (Look Me In the Eye), all of his brother’s (augusten burroughs’) books, and have just finished his mother’s (margaret robison’s) book, The Long Journey Home. I also have a book of her poetry. This family spent a good chunk of time living in western mass, where I live. There’s depression in this family, and anxiety, so I have an interest. There’s Asperger’s in this family too, so I have an interest. And like mother Margaret, I too am an artist and poet, so I have interest.

But I can’t read John Elder’s latest book. It’s the title that’s barring the way. There are indeed Aspies out there whose lives have gone the way John’s has (from what I know of it, which isn’t vast knowledge to be sure). While very young he was lucky enough to know people who knew people in KISS, and so he found a great niche there designing special effects and sound systems. Tinkering with machinery is one of John’s Aspie perseverations (most Aspies have them), and by all reports, he is a whiz at such things. He was able to start his own auto repair business. He is, as far as I know, currently married to his second wife, which means he found at least two women in this world who could love him and make efforts to understand/live with his Aspie differences. For him, and for some other Aspies, being different has paid off.

Then there are the others, and I know full well that I’m not the only one. Those for whom being different has only brought repeated failure, repeated bullying of a dizzying variety of methods, repeated doomed attempts to find a human being who can give love, who will stay, who will learn about the condition. There are Aspie success stories, and there are Aspie non-success stories. In this blog and in my book (www.autisism.wordpress.com), I’m here to write one of the bleak, non-cheerleading stories, hoping that in at least some very limited way, I speak for other Aspies for whom being different has not paid off.

So the title bars the way. I fear a book of excessive optimism, a book of happy phrases telling us how great it is to be autistic, what great things we can do, what great, understanding neurotypicals we can find. My fifty-odd years of living have not borne out all this greatness, and I constantly find other Aspies online whose lives have also not borne this out, this laudable, promise-laden state of being different. For those Aspies (Temple Grandin, Jesse Saperstein, John Michael Carley, and many more) who have been able to find the niches and the people in whose safety they could shine, and do shine, optimism I’m sure makes total sense. But from where I happen to sit at age 50+, and from places where other Aspies of varying ages sit, optimism comes very close to being denial.

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Heard yet another provocative radio story this morning. Provocative to me, at least. And I heard it twice. It was a story from our region, from western Mass. Some reporter or writer or whatever (I didn’t care about her enough to pay attention to her name or profession) went to Wrongplanet.net to find two Aspergians who were in a romantic relationship together. Such a couple was found right here in Amherst and Greenfield. This reporter or whatever was interested in seeing how two Aspies navigated the perils of romance.

So she finds these two people and in October she starts spending time observing them and talking to them. When she was describing certain tendencies that many people with Asperger’s exhibit, she pulled out the psychobabble-bonehead terminology and started my blood to boil, as so often happens when someone (unjustly, not very logically, in my opinion) plays the PBB card.

We Aspies, many of us, have the ability (for such I choose to call it) to focus intensely when something stirs our intellect, or our imagination, or our emotions (yes, many Aspies do indeed have emotions). If we suddenly  take an interest in Swahili, then we will study Swahili with great focus and to the exclusion of other pursuits until we’ve learned what we want to learn.  Or if we’re working on a painting, we may not sleep or eat much until it’s done. And so on. These are just two examples. And if we are the emotional type of Aspie, then our emotions are just as concentrated and focused as our interests. Enter the psychobabble.

The female half of this Aspie couple happens to be one of the emotional variety, and when she is sad, she is very focused on that sadness, on every nuance of how it feels and how it manifests itself and what brought it about. I call this attention to detail, both internal and external. I call it feeling one’s emotion with presence of mind, rather than simply stuffing emotions down and pretending they’re not there.

But the psychiatric community has named this kind of intense focus that Aspies (and even some neurotypicals) can level on a task or an interest or an emotion, perseveration. They have taken the word persevere, which in general has a very positive connotation and is considered a good thing, and have butchered it into this new frankenstein: perseveration. A bad thing. Too much. Too much focus, too much attention to detail. A disorder. Not the variety of the human personality, but yet another freaking, stinking disorder.

I obviously disagree. Strenuously. Both as a human being with a quite good brain who happens to be very emotional,  and as an Aspergian, I will rail against psychobabble that is not useful, that is even harmful, that turns the variety of human personality into an encyclopedia of disorders, until I am either dead or in coma.

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read…   Braon...   Braonwandering…

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I recently read the book (something I can seldom do anymore) Shadows Bright As Glass by Amy Ellis Nutt. It details the brain injury and aftermath of a man named John Sarkin. It’s a book that’s jammed full of fascinating information about the brain in general and this man’s experiences in particular. I have used one of Ms. Nutt’s chapter titles for the title of this post. And I’ve done this because I myself have one of those very loquacious brains, and have known others with them too.

Among many other things that happened to Sarkin was this: after his brain damage was finished happening, and it was a process, he had an absolutely compulsive need to write and paint and draw. This stays with him still, as far as I know. He really can’t do much of anything else. He writes and paints and draws wherever he is, with whatever materials happen to be lying around. He cannot stop.

One of the specialists whom Ms. Nutt quotes in the book is Alice Flaherty, a neurologist at Harvard, and one who worked with John Sarkin. Here are some samples, all taken from the book.

1.  “In many ways, Flaherty said, Sarkin was a classic case of Waxman-Geschwind syndrome, a personality disorder characterized by excessive verbal output, an intensified mental life, and an obsessive preoccupation with detail.”

2.  “Psychologists have retrospectively identified hypergraphic writers, painters, and scientists, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vincent van Gogh, Agatha Christie and Stephen King.”

3.   Flaherty believes it is the limbic system, the seat of our emotions and our most primitive drives, that kicks creativity into hyperdrive in those artists, writers and thinkers who exhibit hypergraphia, and it is suffering and pain that pricks the limbic system into life (italics mine). “…..   “Some scientists, in fact, believe that the act of compulsive writing and art may be an attempt to understand or manage the deep complexity of existence.”

I’m not saying that I disagree with any of Ms. Flaherty’s insights, which I happen to think are very keen. What eternally bothers me about psychiatrists and some neurologists is that every single bloody thing in this world that does not  conform to an arbitrary definition of “normal” (who the hell made that definition anyway? freud? jung? who?) has got to have some loopy label put on it and be classified as either a syndrome or a disorder. If you wash your hands more than somebody or other wants you to, you’re obsessive-compulsive. If you have trouble with small spaces, you’re claustrophobic. Whatever happened to things being just part of the huge variations in human personality? Where did that go? It used to be: Joanie always likes to have clean hands. Walter doesn’t do well with heights. Mary gets her really down periods. Mike is a good guy, but he’s got a hell of a temper. The wide range of possibilities in human personality. Not anymore. Joanie is OC, Walter is acrophobic, Mary is depressive, Mike needs to go to anger management classes. Why isn’t it that just the most extreme examples (like poor Sarkin) get the labels thrown onto them, and the rest just be the way we human beings can be.

Certainly in John Sarkin’s case, his need to create is very extreme, and maybe because of that it deserves labels and syndromes. And then I look at myself. Since the horrifically traumatic events that occurred in my life in 2008, I’ve been writing much, much more than I ever wrote before. Do I have hypergraphia, according to the psychobabbles? Do I have Waxman-Geschwind syndrome? If any psychobabbles would show up here and leave me a comment: yes, anne, you have one or both of those disorders, I might just answer them this way: So what. Who does it hurt that I write a whole lot? I’m doing the best Ican after a fatal blow to my psyche, after everyone I love was stolen and killed, after the worst trauma of my trauma-filled life. I’m not able to kill myself for some reason, so I write. I have no family to take care of anymore, so I write. Just as John Sarkin is doing the best he can after devastating injuries to his brain, I and many others are doing the best we can after equally severe injuries to our psyches. Leave us alone to get on with it.

I myself have always had an extremely loquacious brain, and I’ve known a few others who were that way too. I’ve always had a need for stimulating conversation, reading, writing, drawing, music, making things. The writing and conversation parts have become many times stronger since the events of 2008. So what. I have no one to talk to most of the time, no one to have stimulating conversations with, so I write even more. My brain has a huge need to communicate, in one way or another, and so does John Sarkin’s now. Maybe one of you reading is like that too. Why do we have to have so many labels slapped on so many things. This is the infinite variety of human brains, and human personality. If you paint pictures all day long, so be it. I bless you in your painting. You’re not hurting anyone, as far as I know. Maybe people like us are simply trying to “manage the deep complexity of existence,” and the deep complexity of the pain we’re in.

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read…  Lifelines…    Stolen stars…

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He belonged to my parents, ultimately, but that’s not how it was supposed to be. He was born in the basement of our house during the first semester of my senior year at college, 1974, or maybe even during my junior year in 73. I wasn’t at home for the blessed event, but when I got there for my Christmas break, my brother’s dog Nipsy was installed in the basement with her new children. The father of this bounty was, I think, a dog called Alex who belonged to brother’s friend. The mom had been named after the comedian Nipsy (Nipsey?) Russell, a favorite of brother’s at the time.

At the time that I arrived on the scene for a month’s break from academe, negotiations were going on between Dad and second brother about keeping second brother’s favorite puppy. My parents already had one dog (I’m pretty sure it was the little Scottie), and didn’t want to go through puppyhood again. And you can’t blame them. They were past 45 and had raised a bunch of puppies in their lives, and it’s a lot of work. Back and forth it went, and while my father protested every single time, dragging out the list of reasons to veto (a list that included brother two’s lack of track record for taking care of any animal), I knew by my father’s tone of voice and the slight twinkle in his eye that he wasn’t going to deny my brother this, no matter how effective a battle he pretended to wage.

Black lab-mix puppy was kept. Was called Groucho after brother number two’s favorite comedian, Groucho Marx. In the cement-floored cellar of our house far from Hollywood, Nipsy Russell had given birth to Grouch Marx. Or Marks. However they spelled it.

Groucho lived a long and storied life, dying on 18 May 1990. He was pre-leash-law days in our town, so he chased cars and rabbits and kids and whatever else. He was hit by drivers of cars twice. Yes, my father had a weakness here about young labs: he felt they needed to run. And though Groucho was hit twice and was lucky not to have been killed, my father did not begin restraining him on a dog run until he was at least several years old. He was a big, sloppy, frisky, absolutely harmless lab, like so many of that breed. He chased kids because he loved them and wanted to play, and while most kids around us understood this, a few did not.

Groucho was special for another reason too, in that he was my daughter’s childhood dog. We lived with my parents for her first five years, and she was a dog person from the time she was still in diapers. She and Groucho were great pals for the ten years they had before he died.

And what of brother number two? It was the same old story. He didn’t take care of, even halfway, the animal he’d asked for. Lost interest in training pretty quickly, and as I was away a lot for school and couldn’t help much, the work of the puppy fell to my parents. For all the years that Groucho lived, my father would pull out at every single family gathering, large or small or important or not, the refrain brother number two had used in his campaign to keep the puppy: You’ll never know he’s around, Dad. It became part of the family lore to the point that we would all say it, both to brother number two himself and to each other when he wasn’t even around. Every time Groucho came home covered in mud,  or chased a car halfway across town and Dad had to get into our car to go fetch him, or brought home a snout full or porcupine quills, and all of his other mischief, at least one of us would say it: You’ll never know he’s around, Dad.

Well, he hasn’t been around now, for twenty-one whole years. I remember him with laughter and affection, and with gratitude that he was the first dog who ever showed my very, very small child how great it is to know a dog.

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read…   All my stars…     Stolen stars…    Mugsy’s book

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This friend was a rabbit; the first rabbit I’d had since Peter II had died so young several years before. Though Silky lasted a bit longer than Peter did, she was fated also to die too young.

I got her in the fall of 1987 to be a companion for a white guinea pig whose older black guinea pig pal (Smoky) had died in the spring. I’d seen the pet shop housing young rabbits and pigs together, so I decided to try it. I decided to go from black and white in the same cage to white and white. The only markings Silky had were some small, very pale grey patches on her ears, mouth, and a couple of her feet. While all rabbits have soft, smooth hair, Silky’s was unusually so — I’ve never felt a rabbit so soft — and that’s why she got her name.

When her first spring came, Silky got sick. I took her to the vet, the vet said she was in her first heat, and that some animals do get sick at that time. We pulled her through that one with antibiotics, yogurt and some additions to her diet. But she came into heat every month through spring and summer, and every time, we had to pull her through. If rabbits come into heat in the winter months, they do so at a much less intense level, and Silky was, for her two falls and winters, as healthy as any other rabbit.

But in 1990, the spring of course came again, and Silky in her second spring got much sicker than she had in her first. We couldn’t get her through it that time, the vet and I, and she died when she was less than two years old.

I had her such a short time that I feel, these long years after her death, that I hardly had her at all, hardly knew her. That’s one of the objectionable things that time does. I have to console myself with the knowledge, yet again, that while she was with us, I did indeed know her very well, even if now particular memories of funny things she did, and naughty things she did, and spats that she and Snowball (the white pig) sometimes had, are all faded and I can’t report them here with any detail. She was so soft. Even the vet said when she met her that was she was unusually soft, and that her name fit her.

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read…   All my stars…     Stolen stars…    Mugsy’s book

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In whatever writing I have done online since 2008 concerning my own particular experience on the autism spectrum, I have remained largely on the surface of the thing. I’ve said I don’t smile much compared to most people, and this creates in others an immediate negative: the failure to smile is a negative thing. I’ve said I rock back and forth in anxiety, and this again sets up an instant negative response: rocking back and forth is childish, and weird. If you’re that anxious, have a couple beers, or run around the block, or do anything that we consider normal anxiety relief. I don’t like looking at the human face, for the most part. I do it, but it jangles the nerves. In most cases I don’t find the human face interesting, but rather a shifty, dangerous thing. And these are all important signifiers of a supra-normal (as I choose to call it) neurobiology, but they do not approach what it feels like to need desperately to live in the αυτος, the self. And I feel very strongly that those of us who are on the spectrum and are prone to write, should make every effort to describe as accurrately as we can the experience of being autistic, in the hopes of engendering some real understanding in the minds of neurotypical people.

But I have very little confidence in my own ability to do this effectively. I feel as though there must be other autisitcs who can fulfill this assignment much, much better than I could. And yet for months I’ve been nudging myself to try, and no doubt to produce an inadequate result, and having tried, will discover that no one is interested anyway.

Knowing all that, I still feel obligated to try. Autism is slightly different in each person who has it, so my autism isn’t exactly like anyone else’s. I can only make the best report, the best description I can. No doubt I won’t even get other autistics to come here and read it, much less any neurotypicals. This foreknowledge of futility makes the task even harder to get started on.

I try.                                     

I’m a little kid, three years old. On my bedroom floor coloring. For me the absorption in the picture and the colors I am putting on it are, for the moment, the entire universe. I am totally focussed on and interested in the colors and how they are going to go. Nothing else matters. Enter one of my parents through the door, talking about it’s time for supper or time to go out shopping. Yes, sometimes the parents come to the door bitching about something, but it doesn’t even have to be bitching to totally set me off. Some autistics act out when they are set off, others don’t. I mostly don’t. I get up and leave my colors and my pictures. I get up and leave the universe. But there are internal reactions to this interference from the outside. I am angry that I’ve been taken away from the sheer absorption of color by human voices, and therefore there is yet another reinforcement for my child’s Asperger’s mind that human voices are irriating things. They take me from absorption, they take me from beauty, they tear apart a sphere of bliss I was busy in, and wasn’t ready to leave yet.

Or, still three years old, I am just sitting somewhere, living my newly-devised life in my head. A parallel world I have learned to make for myself, where everything is safe. I make up people for my alternate life, adults and children, and I make up situations. And in every situation, I make the people behave in a way that I understand, that I don’t find confusing, and in that life where I understand, I am safe. I make up sad events and funny ones and all kinds of things to happen in this world I understand. I’m enjoying myself there, I’m energized by this world I understand. And then, again, comes a human voice. And though I usually show no signs, inside me it feels like a tearing, a great ripping, as if pieces of me were being rent from each other when I have to obey the human voices and leave my inner world where all is clear to me. In my teenage years, when I came upon T.S. Eliot’s poem with the line: till human voices wake us, and we drown, I found a line that runs through my head so very many times when a human voice tears me out of my world of the autos, where I am at home, into the sea of society that irritates and hurts and confuses me, and I drown.

There are physical reactions to this tearing, as well as emotional ones. Along with the anger and resentment can come a lurching stomach; or pins and needles in the skin; or a sudden, brief, all-over shudder; or pain inside the ears. Pounding heart, brief chest pain. And so on. Physical responses to being torn from one’s inner world.

Added to the distresses occasioned by Asperger’s, I had a whole other set that were brought about by my serious physical illness in childhood. More human voices piercing into my inner world with do’ s and don’ts and drugs and the words: she’s going to die. All of this resentment of the medical voices fused with the resentment of the ordinary voices that tore me out of my world, so that by the age of three I already regarded smiling as highly suspect and tricky; human voices as scratchy, grating and determined to snatch me from beauty and safety and pleasurable absorption. By the age of three, the human species was already mistrusted, dismissed as mostly unbeautiful and mostly unpeaceful, and impossible to decipher. Why didn’t they understand the way color can completely mesmerize you? Why didn’t they know that I had to stare at the lines of sunlight coming through the window because it was so beautiful that sunlightcould do this, and why weren’t the others completely engaged by those lines too? Why were they too dense to be fascinated by these things?

Most children can get very absorbed in play, but I could get intensely absorbed in almost anything. In watching my parents scream at each other, for example:  the redness in the face, the fire in the eyes, the tension in the muscles, the increasing volume of the voices. This made me nervous, of course, but it also fascinated me from a purely physical point of view to see that the skin and voice and eyes of the angry human could produce all these strange changes.

In light of the anomalous immune system that created so much severe illness, and the autistic neurobiology, and the non-average high IQ, what chance did I ever have to be average, or to be of any interest or value at all to average people? What chance did I have to be other than at some level a crashing weirdo, and more often than not, a burden to the average? I look back over many, many years, and still believe my chances of being anything like average and likable and acceptable and lovable were already, by the age of three, slim and none. No one knew I had Asperger’s, except me (and I certainly didn’t know what it was called, or that other people had it too), and even if they had, in the years that I happened to be growing up, not much of anyone would have tried to understand or accomodate it.

Has it been this way for scores of Aspie children, especially those of my generation?

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read…   Neverending solitaire

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Sunday I came across a reference to an article discussing the fact that “high-functioning adults with Asperger’s may not understand other people’s intentions.” I didn’t go and read the article itself, as I had other things to do. But boy oh boy, what an understatement: May not understand other people’s intentions. For myself, I would have to revise the sentence to read: rarely understand people’s conscious intentions. Because for myself, I don’t have nearly as much trouble with people’s unconscious intentions. The anger that they’re trying to hide, but you can feel it. Or the jealousy. Or the desire to use you, or whatever else. These subconscious, or conscious-but-I’m-tyring-to-hide-it-from-you, ulterior issues are often easier for me to grasp than the person’s planned intent.

What is their intent? What are their words that they just uttered trying to elicit from me? What is that particular sort of smile intended to make me feel? What does pretending to be fond of me when they really are not do for them, and what is it supposed to do for or to me?  What do they mean? What do they intend? What is their agenda?  Because if there is one thing I’ve finally figured out  — and it took me decades — it’s that non-autisitic people do, in fact, always have an agenda. Every word, every facial expression, every tone of voice is either consciously or unconsciously designed to produce a certain effect in and get a certain response from the person they’re performing for. Neurotypicals are always performing, and trying to manage others, and trying to manipulate others.

And while I can’t speak for any other high-functioning adult with Asperger’s, I can say that for me non-autisitc people’s intentions are a nearly incomprehensible minefield, a constant source of anxiety, a constant source of hurt, a stomach-sickening ordeal that I don’t get free of until I’m dead, apparently.

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(part of the book Neverending Solitaire)

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

The tale of yet another stress-laden, depression-laden Christmas. I’m sure readers don’t like it — so many tales of gloom. What can I tell you. I don’t like it either. In fact I resent it quite a lot that since 1997 I’ve had to spend so many holidays and birthdays and plain old days with various ugly millstones hanging around my bloody neck. I don’t like it one bit.

In 2002 money was tighter than ever. I’d had a small part-time job for a good long while, and as small a job as it was, the money really helped keep me and my animals afloat. But after years of putting up with my two certifiably bonkers employers, I couldn’t take it anymore, and quit. They’d wanted me to quit for a long while anyway, because they had drained out the money they were using to pay me by buying a van. This money wasn’t theirs, but they had legal access to it. In September I quit.

I quit and began scrabbling to find either a roommate to help with expenses, or another little job. By Christmas I still hadn’t found either. I couldn’t buy any gifts that year, and I had a certain small number of people to whom I wanted to give gifts. That year was my big year of drawing. I drew more than I have in any other year of my life, and all this drawing started out as a way to relieve stress for a while each day. But around the time I quit my job, the drawing had become something else: a way to bring in a very few dollars. I’d found a store to take my bookmarks on consignment, and that brought in just a little bit. I also sold a good number of them myself, directly to people I knew. By the time December 25 rolled around, I’d actually had two very bad days when I’d gone begging with two small pictures I drawn. I begged one friend to buy one from me, saying that she could pay anything at all for it, no amount would be too small or insulting. They were small pictures, after all. Maybe 5 inches by 5 inches. She chose the one that had taken me the most time. Layers and layers of various colors and kinds of ink. A butterfly. She paid me $20 for it, and I thought that was a fortune for a small drawing by an unknown artist. The next day I went to Greenfield and took my other picture with me. I ran into someone I knew, told her that I’d begun drawing (she’d only known me as a writer), and showed her my little thing. She said she really liked it. “Would you want to buy it?” She asked me how much, and again I said anything at all. Ten dollars. I was pleased. Thirty dollars from these two small pictures; but that amount of money that almost everyone would consider small, made a difference to me and my animals that Christmas. There were several other kinds of begging I had to do that holiday season, and that’s enough said about that. Shame. Humiliation. And Christmas gifts? Everyone got either bookmarks or little pictures. More shame. I didn’t consider my art to be the right thing for a Christmas gift.                           

There was a blizzard that Christmas day. A real doozie. No human being called me, or visited me, or invited me over. I had my animals, and that was of course the most important thing. But as I’ve said elsewhere: at Christmas you expect to have at least a little something with family and/or friends of the human variety. The only human celebration open to me that day was a free Christmas dinner at one of the churches. The friend who’d bought my butterfly was running it. I’d been told about the time of the dinner before the forecasts for the blizzard started coming in. So on the day, I bundled up, trudged in the dark afternoon through the raging wind and the trillions of falling flakes and the piles of them on the sidewalks. Only to arrive and find that the dinner was nearly over. Most of the diners were gone, and those remaining had huge boxes of leftovers they were taking home. I sat down at the only table that still had a cloth on it, ate, and took a very few leftovers back with me, as there was practically nothing left. When I got back home to my animals, I wished I’d never left them on a stormy Christmas day to drag myself through nature’s fury for a bloody dinner that was over. I still wish that. I wish it more than ever. 

About a week before the big day and the storm and the dinner whose time got changed and nobody told me, I’d got two packages in the mail. One from my daughter with a variety of items in it, including more of the pens I drew with. And another big box from a friend. She’d told me in October that she was making throw pillows for people, asked if I’d like some, and I’d said yes. But in all the time since we’d had that talk, the stresses of my life had driven it out of my head, and I only remembered pillows when I saw the big box.

Five throw pillows, each a slightly different size, each made of a different fabric. They were cheerful, and cute, and hand-made by my friend far away, and in that particular gloom of that particular holiday season, those pillows delighted me. They delighted me for five and a half years, and I safeguarded those pillows like a security dog every time we had to move. I haven’t laid eyes on them now for nearly three years. They are in the storage unit, I hope. Four of them, anyway. What happened to the fifth is a post unto itself.  I miss all of my belongings, old and shabby as most of them are. But with yet another Christmas just gone, I’m at the time of year when I think of certain gifts that shine out in the gloom of my holidays over the last thirteen years. There’s always a smile for those pillows, and for the long-lost friend who made them.

The contradiction isn’t lost on me that while I found my own hand-done drawings a rather shameful thing to give at Christmas, I did not feel that way about Elizabeth’s pillows. Quite the opposite. Anything anyone else makes by hand is a great Christmas gift, as far as I’m concerned. But things made by me? Not so much.

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