OCR Text |
Show an empty waiting room and I sat her on my lap and rocked her for awhile. And many times I repeated the explanation of "two planes" that were"different" and that we had to"wait' for a "long time. ' She had sensed the emotion and was frightened. Something was amiss, and she could not figure out what it was. This was only another "vacation" and we had traveled many times before. Patty's first experience with airplanes had come about that year; she was mystified. We ate lunch in the airport cafeteria and she carried her own tray to the table, holding it against my back. She placed all the items on her table and set the tray on a chair- She put her napkin in her lap and ate one thing at a time, holding her fork correctly and cutting most precisely with her knife. She was worried and thought she should try her very best to do everything we had taught her properly and with great concern for details. I was quite proud of her, sitting there in her three-piece gray suit with a giant red poppy at her chin, carefully wiping her mouth after each bite. She had become extremely quiet and I knew the words in my hands couldn't justify any of it. It was pointless to try to explain. I had become what is called "over-involved" and "worried too much," according to our school social worker, who was the force behind the decision to send her back. Example-making is such a strange phenomenon. There is nowhere to pin the blame exactly. Perhaps that is why human beings have a tendency for groups, a way of hiding blame. I can see us now, sitting in the tiny and final airport, The only passengers on a prop plane, waiting for our car to come. There are boxes all around us, tied with string and taped securely, not a suitcase among them. Years of her institution life strung out before us in the form of clothes that were still traveling back and forth with her- Clothes that had not fit her for years, stamped with the state insignia and traveling on the rule of protocol. We are holding hands and waiting. But the car never comes. Communication between facilities is so poor now that we have come on the wrong day and are not expected until tomorrow. May I never fully comprehend a definition of "wrong day." By the time they came to meet us, my flight was about to leave. It was the only plane out of there that evening and I had not even visited the school yet. Just out of grad school, with no extra funds in my savings and a policy of being reimbursed months after -20- |