NYC

I have been trying to get a handle on this blog/podcast venture, lately the technology side of things eclipsing the content. What should the iTunes logo look like? What blogging software should I use? These and other questions have kept my nose to the computer and my mind off the stuff that engendered the site: my son’s autism, being a father. My wife calls my office “a man cave” and I’ve been deep in the man cave, even as our holiday guests were noshing on cheese and crackers in the living room. We are going to New York to visit my sisters and maybe that will sever my cyber umbilical cord and force me to interact. Or maybe I’ll just borrow my sister’s computer… My son is thrilled to be going. We live across the country from his five cousins–all girls–who he sees once a year. This trip started as a bedtime story. “Tell me about going to the cousins’  house,” he’d tell me night after night. The story told of how a character based on my son (but never actually my son himself; a purist, he would never allow such an intrusion) how a little boy boards a plane in the early morning: the long drive to the airport, the darkness, boarding the plane, the shudder as it lifts off. “Tell me the story about the cousins’ house. When are we going to the cousins’ house?” he then started to add. Finally, as if coming up with an ending to the story, (a story I had probably repeated a hundred times!) I told him, “I don’t know. Maybe this spring. Maybe for Christmas.” So tomorrow I will get up at 4:00 AM, jostle him awake. We will be groggy and jet lagged, and in Brooklyn, at my sister’s house, there will be no time to think. We will lapse into the next year and maybe once we return time will slow down a bit. We will think about those impossibly gentle therapists that interviewed us at Friendly Helpers, the special school in the basement of the church. I will wonder if I can get some surfing into the blog even though I don’t surf myself. Whether I can work  some “California” into California Father, or for that matter some “Father.”