novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- some of my kids. i love my kids. bear was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. his head looks squished into his shoulders. his hands are too big for his body. he sits very close to me and does not make eye contact. he is eighteen and very sweet. he only acts like an idiot when the more lucid boys are around him, and then they talk about breasts. adam learned to say "up" when he wants to be picked up, but he learned it backwards--"pu." to fix this, one of the staff taught him "upa." he is a scrawny twelve year old eighty year old italian man. i imagine him with a giant fake black mustache that curls on the tips, and slight accordian sounds following him whenever he stretches his arm towards a staff member. there is terry who almost jumped in the lake before i caught him and made him sit with me and watch the geese from a safe distance. the only words he says audibly are "pee pee" and "choo choo." he is twenty. tony knows every lyric of every song he has ever heard. i love it when he sings "stand" for me because he makes his voice really high for the part that goes "now face north." he claps his hands without beat and remembers to ask for creepy crawlers, which is a tickling, calming massage we use to quell some of the students when they get too excited. running fingertips down one's back can be sleep-inducing. i am reading case files after the kids have been shuttled off to their various parents or more likely group homes, finding out who was prostituted as a child, who kicked their pregnant mother in her belly, who runs away to walk in-between lanes of fast moving cars on the highway. 2:13 am - 03.03.02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||