Got a Happy Story is a community gathering every Monday night where we share stories large and small that have put a smile on our face. The Happy Story diary exists as a way to anchor the community in hope and comfort while we do the hard work of maintaining a permanent Democratic majority. Everyone and all sorts of stories and pictures are welcome. Consider this an open thread.
"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Yesterday, my eighteen-year-old friend Daniel made a shopping list and took himself down to the supermarket for the first time. Picture him now as he stands before the meat counter comparing prices, ultimately deciding on chicken legs because he's just learned that dark meat is cheaper. He considers giving up milk because he's shocked, shocked at the cost of a gallon. He's amazed at how many kinds of lettuce there are, and unwisely if logically chooses iceberg because it's the least expensive.
Doesn't seem all that extraordinary, does it? Nor the standard fare of a Happy Story. Well, consider this...
Daniel has Asperger's. He's struggled all his life with simple tasks, though he's unassailably brilliant.
After a very troubled year in which he found himself in all kinds of hot water, some inadvertent, some of his own making, he went off to college this past August.
In the few months he's been there, he's lost three cell phones, two computers, and the key card to gain admittance to his dorm five times (the security people became quite familiar with him).
Daniel did well in some classes, abysmally in others ("Greek is, after all, Greek," his mother said to me).
Classmates routinely lent him clothing because he tended to show up to class in various stages of undress.
There were actions he'd thought innocent -- like setting fire to a plastic cup on the concrete outside the library, in order to help him focus on a paper due on Aristotle -- that brought down the wrath of the administration on his very surprised head.
And then his mother got a call from the college, saying that they'd dismissed him, and wanted him gone immediately. Not for one massive infraction, but rather a string of relatively minor ones for which he'd been warned two, three, four times and more.
Now, Daniel's mother, Eleanor, has been enjoying her hard-earned peace and quiet. Continuing her career as an actress, doing community work, and generally feeling freer than she had since she herself was in college. So that phone call was a mighty unwelcome one. Unwelcome, but not altogether unexpected. As she explained, when you have a kid who's in graduate school mentally, and barely into Middle School emotionally and socially, you never really relax.
Daniel's quite impressive parting comments to his Assistant Dean were "Well... now I know a lot more of what I don't know, and what I need to know to know how to handle what I don't know."
So Eleanor -- who was upstate shutting down her summer home when she got the call -- turned around and put in a twelve hour day of driving to go get him, and together they crammed all his stuff into the tiny Corolla she'd rented. ("Looked like a circus car," she told me afterward.)
After driving back to the city, both of them exhausted and cranky, they got out a couple of yellow legal pads and tried to write down some boundaries for the two of them. Eleanor divided hers between needs and wants: the former being non-negotiable, like no smoking in the house, no drinking, no fires, no skipping meds. The latter are urgent requests, like hygiene, and not messing with the internet so that Time Warner can't even figure out what's wrong when they come to fix it.
Then Eleanor said to Daniel, "I will love you and root for you. But I won't 'parent' the way I used to. We're going to be two adults sharing an apartment. No more mothering from me, and no childishness from you. I won't clean up after you, shop for you, or cook for you."
"I'll starve," Daniel said in alarm.
"Very possible," said Eleanor, "unless you make a list, get money from your bank account, and go to Fairway." She knew she was throwing him into the deep end of the pool, as it was the weekend before Thanksgiving, but she was determined the new rules had to start immediately, before either of them lapsed back into their old routine.
So Daniel made his shopping list, and showed it to Eleanor. She told him pretty accurately the cost of each item he'd listed, and before her amazed eyes, he began crossing things off the list.
Daniel went to the bank and withdrew money. He decided to walk to the supermarket in order to save money on his MetroCard. At Fairway, he learned that bigger is cheaper, and the aforementioned how-many-kinds-of-lettuce-there-are, and the light-verus-dark meat that led to his selecting chicken legs. He learned that butter came salted and unsalted, and chose unsalted. Bought a bag of apples rather than paying by the pound. Decided he didn't need cereal, that he would eat health bread for breakfast. Made the startling discovery that popcorn you make yourself instead of the packets of microwave stuff is a lot cheaper as a snack than potato chips.
He learned a lot yesterday. He went through his first checkout, trying to juggle his wallet and packing the canvas bag he'd brought. And, Eleanor imagined, as he lugged it all back on the bus he took note of all the young and attractive folk with their own shopping bags, doing the same as he, which she hopes made him feel rather farther along in the whole growing up thing.
So he came home and made a health bread and baby spinach sandwich, then went out for a cigarette with his Complete Plato tucked under his arm. He came back quite a while later (his mom says she's doing pretty well letting go of the images of Daniel getting mugged in the park for his Complete Plato), having walked to Barnes and Noble. He'd gone there to look for "The Failsafe Diet," which he says basically deals with concentrating on whole foods and avoiding certain others in a system that purportedly helps with autism, Asperger's, ADD, etc. He'd heard about it from a friend at college, and wants to try it. Turned out the book's out of print, but Amazon has a copy.
"So," Eleanor told me, "a few months ago he was buying fantasy science fiction, now he's into cookbooks. A happy ending? We'll see. But he's got a big smile on his face today, a big improvement over the slump-shouldered discouragement I saw when I picked him up. Growing up is hard to do, but has its satisfactions."
So Daniel went on his first food shopping adventure, and unpacked his frugal purchases onto the couple of shelves in the cupboard and one in the fridge his mother has allotted him. And then made himself a sandwich with health bread and baby spinach. That's a mighty good start. And for me, loving Daniel and Eleanor as I do, a really happy story.
Have you got a happy story for us tonight? Please share what you've got. You know how very much we enjoy that.