Read Online A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Eustacia Cutler
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salvation.
Dick and I decide to take a trip alone to Europe. Dick, with his usual zeal to account for every waking moment, arranges a precise itinerary with a travel agency, but somehow in total variance with his usual custom and to my delight, he’s also arranged a car rental. By ourselves, he tells me, we’ll motor from Paris, through the Rhône valley and the chateau region, all the way down to Nice. Dick speaks French; I speak a little, so between us and a good road map, he figures we’ll be able to arrive each night at the destination the travel agent has booked for us.
Paris is all that Paris is supposed to be. My uncle, Austin Purves, my father’s brother and a well-known artist, is creating a war memorial, commissioned by the French government, a mosaic Pieta honoring the WWII Americans killed fighting on French soil. Instead of the dead Christ, the grieving Madonna will hold a dead GI in her lap. My uncle has rented an atelier in Paris and is assembling the Pieta with the help of two craftsmen who work in mosaic. Great sheets of brown paper with the figures sketched in charcoal have been mailed from his studio in Litchfield, Connecticut, and are now spread out on the floor awaiting the mosaic squares. The squares have to be glued onto the brown paper sketches, back side to, and mirror fashion. Later, the brown paper with its glued mosaic pieces will be shipped to Draguignon, there pressed into wet cement, the brown paper peeled off and voila! The figures emerge from their mirror mode, right side up and right side to. *
“What if you make a mistake?” I ask my uncle.
“You have to take a pickaxe to the cement.”
Dick enjoys all this, including an evening ride up the Seine in the Bateau Mouche, Uncle Austin and Aunt Ellen, Dick and I, all four of us singing at the top of our lungs. The next day in our rented car, we drive out of Paris and into the French countryside with its mackerel skies and wheat fields bordered with the flowers that wreathe little girls’ straw hats: daisies, buttercups, corn flowers, and poppies. Released from the strain of autism, Dick sheds his anxiety, and we throw away the travel agent’s itinerary. We drive off on an unplanned side trip into the fringes of the Alps, spend a night with a troop of hikers, share supper with them at a long trestle table and carry on in broken French.
When we finally reach Nice, it’s a startling disappointment. The stretch of pebbles that passes for a beach reeks of French perfume and sweat. Scrawny codgers, their withered loins ill-covered, totter about, ogling girls.
Now really throwing away the itinerary, we get back in the car to motor away the afternoon looping up and down and along and around the winding roads of the Riviera coast. Finally we come to an inn entrance that looks vaguely impressive, drive up and book a room, only to realize that by some miracle of beginner’s luck, we’ve found our way to Noel Coward land: the Hotel du Cap in Cap D’Antibes. The long and short of it is we end up cruising the Riviera with a couple from Chile who’ve chartered a boat out of Cannes and ask us to join them. Dick says yes and, for once in his life, enjoys improvising. We rove the Mediterranean, anchor off tiny islands known only to boats that can moor in shallow water, and sail to St. Tropez, already a destination for the great and glamorous but as yet untouched by hype.
Dick’s purchase a year later of a cabin cruiser for the Vineyard harks back, I feel sure, to this European trip. A recollection of total happiness.
* The ability to see mirror-fashion is an Asperger’s trait.
Chapter 4
The Separate Worlds Begin
It’s late summer and we’re back in Dedham from the Vineyard. Temple’s turned seven, and family life has settled into a routine. I should have a sense of achievement, but, instead, I feel anxious and empty, longing for the old beckon and wink of Cambridge. I watch the children playing in the field behind our house and into
Dick and I decide to take a trip alone to Europe. Dick, with his usual zeal to account for every waking moment, arranges a precise itinerary with a travel agency, but somehow in total variance with his usual custom and to my delight, he’s also arranged a car rental. By ourselves, he tells me, we’ll motor from Paris, through the Rhône valley and the chateau region, all the way down to Nice. Dick speaks French; I speak a little, so between us and a good road map, he figures we’ll be able to arrive each night at the destination the travel agent has booked for us.
Paris is all that Paris is supposed to be. My uncle, Austin Purves, my father’s brother and a well-known artist, is creating a war memorial, commissioned by the French government, a mosaic Pieta honoring the WWII Americans killed fighting on French soil. Instead of the dead Christ, the grieving Madonna will hold a dead GI in her lap. My uncle has rented an atelier in Paris and is assembling the Pieta with the help of two craftsmen who work in mosaic. Great sheets of brown paper with the figures sketched in charcoal have been mailed from his studio in Litchfield, Connecticut, and are now spread out on the floor awaiting the mosaic squares. The squares have to be glued onto the brown paper sketches, back side to, and mirror fashion. Later, the brown paper with its glued mosaic pieces will be shipped to Draguignon, there pressed into wet cement, the brown paper peeled off and voila! The figures emerge from their mirror mode, right side up and right side to. *
“What if you make a mistake?” I ask my uncle.
“You have to take a pickaxe to the cement.”
Dick enjoys all this, including an evening ride up the Seine in the Bateau Mouche, Uncle Austin and Aunt Ellen, Dick and I, all four of us singing at the top of our lungs. The next day in our rented car, we drive out of Paris and into the French countryside with its mackerel skies and wheat fields bordered with the flowers that wreathe little girls’ straw hats: daisies, buttercups, corn flowers, and poppies. Released from the strain of autism, Dick sheds his anxiety, and we throw away the travel agent’s itinerary. We drive off on an unplanned side trip into the fringes of the Alps, spend a night with a troop of hikers, share supper with them at a long trestle table and carry on in broken French.
When we finally reach Nice, it’s a startling disappointment. The stretch of pebbles that passes for a beach reeks of French perfume and sweat. Scrawny codgers, their withered loins ill-covered, totter about, ogling girls.
Now really throwing away the itinerary, we get back in the car to motor away the afternoon looping up and down and along and around the winding roads of the Riviera coast. Finally we come to an inn entrance that looks vaguely impressive, drive up and book a room, only to realize that by some miracle of beginner’s luck, we’ve found our way to Noel Coward land: the Hotel du Cap in Cap D’Antibes. The long and short of it is we end up cruising the Riviera with a couple from Chile who’ve chartered a boat out of Cannes and ask us to join them. Dick says yes and, for once in his life, enjoys improvising. We rove the Mediterranean, anchor off tiny islands known only to boats that can moor in shallow water, and sail to St. Tropez, already a destination for the great and glamorous but as yet untouched by hype.
Dick’s purchase a year later of a cabin cruiser for the Vineyard harks back, I feel sure, to this European trip. A recollection of total happiness.
* The ability to see mirror-fashion is an Asperger’s trait.
Chapter 4
The Separate Worlds Begin
It’s late summer and we’re back in Dedham from the Vineyard. Temple’s turned seven, and family life has settled into a routine. I should have a sense of achievement, but, instead, I feel anxious and empty, longing for the old beckon and wink of Cambridge. I watch the children playing in the field behind our house and into
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