Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe - Blog

When I was nine years old, someone gave me a diary. It was probably a birthday present. The diary was covered in smooth, dark brown leather, and, of course, had a little gold lock. It was almost as big as a moleskine, with one lined page for every day of the year.

I wrote in it regularly at first, but as my busy nine-year-old life went by, I wrote less and less. Those days that brought my first writer’s block I often wrote, “boss nothing.”

I can’t remember what that slang meant. It was probably something I overheard the older kids say. I, and my other friends who lived around my family in the housing project, liked to try out the language we heard around us, although most of the things older kids did rarely interested us, like standing around listening to Motown blare through someone’s kitchen window, sneaking cigarettes and playing cards or dice for money. We’d rather ride, doubled up on our banana-seat bikes, up and down the hills and around the neighborhood. Sometimes we’d sneak to the playground in the center of the apartment court. Although my friends’ moms never said anything about it, my mom had forbidden my sisters and me to play there. The asphalt underneath the jungle gym and swings was always covered in a layer of broken glass.

Eventually I started leaving pages of my diary blank, although there’s the spot where two pages of the diary came to life one last time. That was when Miss Marx died.

I loved my fourth grade teacher, Miss Marx. She was young and tall and exotically beautiful and sometimes smelled of Dippity-Doo. She had perfect handwriting, which was important, because we were learning to write in cursive in her class. Miss Marx rarely got angry with us, like the older teachers sometimes did. The few times that she did, we were all ashamed. I became a voracious reader in her class, working my way quickly through a color-coded, independent reading program. I came to love social studies because Miss Marx loved social studies. For our unit on the Netherlands, I drew a picture of a Dutch barn, because Miss Marx wanted us to understand how other people lived.

We arrived one morning to whispers in the hall, whispers that stopped at our classroom door. Miss Marx wasn’t there. Even though we hated the change of the routine that came with a substitute teacher, we knew, somehow, that today was different. We were very quiet when the new teacher told us that Miss Marx wasn’t coming back because she’d died the day before, and it was all very sudden and it wasn’t our fault, but this new teacher would be our teacher now and if we want to write something or draw a picture until recess, that was ok, because we wouldn’t be having any lessons until later today.

A few kids cried right away, but I didn’t until later, when I went home at lunch. and told Mom, and she hugged me, and then I cried and Mom told me that it would be ok if I didn’t go back to school in the afternoon. So I took a long nap.

Dad was home when I woke up. I studied my picture of the Dutch barn and wrote in my diary. I really wanted to know why Miss Marx died. Some of the other teachers had said that she wasn’t sick, but I didn’t believe them because Miss Marx always had bad headaches. She went home the day she died with a really bad headache. A day or so later, Dad clipped a short obituary for Miss Marx that ran in the Milwaukee Journal. Her first name was Roxanne. She died of an aneurism. Dad told me that meant a blood vessel burst in her brain. He said that the doctors really can’t help anyone who gets that because they bleed too fast. So I wrote that in my diary and pasted the obituary next to it. The paste wrinkled the page and made it different from all the others.

After that, I pretty much abandoned my diary, although I tried from time to time. When I clean out dresser drawers or repack memory boxes, the rest of the memories of the fourth grade are pretty spotty. I don’t remember the new teacher at all, not even her handwriting.

March 2 … Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Texas Independence Day. And birthday of one Michael J. Wolfe.

Enjoy all that cake sweetheart!

It’s a quiet Friday night and I’ve knocked out a bunch of items on my to-do list. That’s usually when I get to an old box that needs cleaning out.

When the Sacramento Symphony got into financial trouble in the early 1990s, Mark and I moved the family a lot. At one point, I counted seven moves in less than three years. Some of our belongings got into boxes and never got pulled out again. A friend once said, “Three moves are as good as a fire.”

I suppose if I applied the rule of women’s closets, if you haven’t worn it in a year, throw it out. Likewise, if you’ve lived without the contents of a box for a decade, maybe it’s time to throw it out. We did throw out a bunch of them, but not our books boxes. Yet I’m still looking for the best parenting book I’ve ever read. I don’t know if I loaned it to someone, or if it got tossed because it wasn’t packed in a book box, but sometimes I really miss it. Randy Rolfe’s “You Can Postpone Anything But Love.”

The first thing I will tell you is that it is NOT one of those books that make you feel guilty for repeatedly missing school functions or not getting dinner on the table until 9:02 p.m. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – a calm and deeply spiritual tome.

You know it when your baby is born, the first thing you see and feel is love. We’re all born loving beings. Part of the reason why you can’t take your eyes off your baby is that you know, at some level, you’re seeing it all, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. Love.

Parents of kids with special needs know this deep in the viscera.

Kids are amazingly resilient when they know that at their core, and yours, it’s unconditional love all around.

A dear friend of Mark’s clipped an op-ed piece for me from the New York Times earlier this month. Another person might have sent me a link, or emailed the essay, but I liked Mary’s hand-written note and her careful clipping, which included the date at the top of the paper – a full citation.

In the piece, Roy Richard Grinker, the father of a teenage girl with autism, advocates for the elimination of Asperger’s and PDD-NOS as subsets of autism. He made a good case, and we can leave the outcome of what belongs in the diagnostic manual to the experts.

Grinker also made compelling argument that the spectrum diagnosis gives families little information about the future. Sam was diagnosed with autism when he was 4 years old by a skillful pediatrician. However, I was skeptical of the doctor’s prediction that Sam would be functioning well enough by the time he was 14 or 15 that most people wouldn’t know he had it. Grinker’s experience read much like ours. His daughter had all the symptoms for an autism diagnosis when she was 3 and is now a quirky high school senior.

Grinker wrote that if his daughter were diagnosed now, she would likely be diagnosed with Asperger’s instead. We’ve had that same experience with Sam.

A diagnosis doesn’t predict the future, but early intervention – the kind that helps speech and language development, even if it has to be augmented – can have an effect. Well-planned and executed educational therapy is the only proven way to help kids with autism adapt.

And it doesn’t have to be 40 hours a week of one-on-one. We found that a house set up for enriched, structured play – the way Maria Montessori envisioned her school rooms – went a long, long way.

There may be potential in other treatments, but it is incumbent upon parents, like physicians, to first do no harm. That’s not as easy as you think. Parents who fear they are drowning will grasp at straws. We need to get better about communicating to parents what is proven and effective; and help them have faith in incremental progress. I remember how hard it was to have faith that Sam’s small bits of progress each day or week would add up over time. But really, truly, they do.

When Sam was diagnosed in April 1992, there were three other people in the room to support us besides the pediatrician. They swept in with resources and suggestions and contacts in the community. I don’t think I’ve ever fully appreciated what that support meant to us until just now, writing this. Thanks for doing it right, Dr. James Copeland, wherever you are.

If I write this entry in journalism’s classic inverted pyramid style, then I’ll open with the ending (even though you NEVER open with a quote).

“Mom, I think we should keep the Kindle,” Sam said tonight. “It’s turning out to be useful.”

He then apologized for being slow to warm to it, saying he didn’t know about them before he got it for Christmas. I told him not to worry about it since I didn’t know much about it before then either. We’ve been slogging through this together for the past six weeks. But it’s been worthwhile.

The deal-maker came tonight as Sam used the search function to help him prepare for his first test. The teacher provides them with a long list of prompts. Sam started with the book and its index, finding about half of what he needed that way. But the Kindle’s search function paid off handsomely for those things he wasn’t able to find the old-fashioned way.

In addition, he asked me to show him again the highlighting function. Some of the questions could be answered by grabbing up the topic sentences of several consecutive paragraphs, and it was a lot easier for him to pull together the big picture with those little Kindle underscores showing the way.

For the few of you that I know have been following us on this Kindle journey, I will put together a primer in a future post. Here’s hoping it will help others trying to foster greater reading comprehension with their loved ones or clients.

For me – while books will always be the bee’s knees – I likely will be buying my own e-reader soon. But not a Kindle. I want a reader for carrying around news, government reports and other pdf files. Kindle charges for that. If I get the report for free, I don’t want to pay to “manage” it on a Kindle. That’s just stupid.