All I can say, I am full of this---trepidation---today as it is Charlie’s first day back at school after last year’s school year came to a really tough end. (As in, a little stack of incident reports and a district-requested IEP meeting in which we were informed, Charlie was not to return to his public school classroom.) Summer school went pretty well, though it was only a half a day, started later, and took place in a school building emptied of most of its 1400 adolescents (only Charlie’s class and one other special education class were there). Today school is back in session with all of those 1400 students and the bus comes at 7.19am (as we discovered last Friday after we made a couple of phone calls; we did not receive any information about this as some other families did).

So I’m full of trepidation about Charlie’s first day at school and really for all the days and weeks to follow. Charlie often does all right at the start of things and then, after a lag, things get difficult. Jim and I have been talking and planning a lot about what to do in the event that “something” happens and I feel good about that, but still, trepidation.

Being me, I have a certain poem on my mind, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne. I first read this poem when I was in the ninth grade, in my first year at a new school. The speaker of the poem addresses his wife before he departs on the journey. He asks to refrain from “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests”  as such would “profane” their love. And then, in the next stanza, he writes:

    Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
        Men reckon what it did, and meant ;                             
    But trepidation of the spheres, 
        Though greater far, is innocent

Men on earth try to understand the “moving of th’ earth” (as an earthquake); the poet says that his love for his wife is something “above” the earthly and more akin to a shaking in the celestial spheres (these would be the concentric globes that were thought to surround the earth, according to Aristotelian cosmology).  The poem closes with a beautiful image of a compass: Her soul is the “fix’d foot” and “leans, and hearkens after” the other moving foot as it “roams” and moves. And I suppose you could say, in regard to Charlie, I feel rather like that “fix’d foot” that leans after my boy when he goes out into the world, away from us, and stays fixed and steady, waiting for his return.

Yes, a little poetry (and poetic exegesis) is what I turn to in time of trepidation. Charlie, on the night before his return to school, alike turned his thoughts to something comforting, something well-remembered: The garage door of my in-laws’ large split-level house.

If you read about Charlie’s and our lives on my Autismland blog, you would have read about how we moved in with my in-laws in June of 2006, so Charlie could go to school in this school district. We moved into our own apartment in September of 2007 (yes, living with them did not work out). Charlie had been very glad to find himself living in his grandparents’ house, which has a huge (an acre’s worth) of a yard, a long driveway, and---his longtime favorite---a huge garage (originally with two doors, expanded to three). After we moved out, Charlie refused to go to the house and barely tolerated seeing it. And then yesterday, after he’d had dinner and while Jim was speaking about his book in New York, Charlie asked for “close open garage door.”

It was a 10-minute ride to my father-in-law’s. (My mother-in-law is now in a nursing home.) A few blocks away, Charlie said “no.” And then “yes.” So I told him I would drive across the street from the house and he could make up his mind. He said “yes” when he saw the house. I parked the car and he ran out and up and down the driveway and in front of the three garage doors He was wary of nearing the front steps. He ran under the huge pine trees a bit and tapped the wall between two of the garage doors. He smiled.

Then Charlie went to the sidewalk and got in the car, and we went back home, and he went straight to bed.

A little nostalgia for both of us, to get us to the next, big step.