Balloons

I like to think about them sometimes, the balloons.

The only balloon I remember from my childhood was the balloon I got while waiting for my parents to find me when I was lost at the State Fair. I remember getting lost, following someone who looked like my dad but wasn't my dad, and then realizing that fact, and being lost. I don't remember how I was found by the people who gave me the balloon and I actually don't remember my parents coming and getting me from the tent where I was waiting. I do remember, though, that the balloon had been tied around my wrist so that I wouldn't lose it. Only I lost it. It came untied, and as we were walking away from the tent, the balloon slipped off my wrist and floated up into the air, drifting away.

"We'll get another one," my mom said. But we didn't.

The first time the boys let a balloon go, I expected the worst. We were leaving the dollar store, where I liked to walk with them to look around and let them buy a couple things and then we'd go swimming at the pool or walk over to the park and play on the slides. Jude had bought a balloon, possibly a "Happy Birthday" balloon even though it was nobody's birthday, and so I'd gotten one for Dylan, too. It's never clear if Dylan is able to ask for something, so a lot of times we just get him something that Jude is also getting and that way we figure it's equal, even though nothing is ever equal and you can't really make it be. But you've got to try, right? If you don't try to make things equal, it seems like you're making it worse.

Having paid for the balloons and whatnot, we went outside and were going to walk over to the park to play. But first, Dylan let his balloon go, and stood there watching it go. I said something, something like "oh, no," or whatever it is parents say in that situation, and added "We can get another one, Dylan." I really meant to actually get another one, though.

But he wasn't upset. He just stood there, watching the wind take the mylar balloon and twist it around, moving it horizontally almost as much as the balloon rose, heading across the parking lot baking in the early June heat, with only a few cars parked there because it's not much of a minimall. The hardware store does the best business, followed by the dollar store, but the other stores seem not really to be open. There' s a mexican restaurant there. It's hard for me to picture anyone going to eat at a restaurant that's next to an H&R Block and a Planet Fitness in a sad little minimall.

The balloon was heading across the street, which is always busy no matter what time of day or night it is. There is a grove of trees across from the minimall next to the liquor store over there. The trees are actually some kind of park or preserve or something, but they look like the kind of place where people throw tires and old bikes, so we never go over there. But as we watched, the balloon headed for those trees, the wind pushing it and the balloon trying to get higher up as it went, and we, or at least I, was wondering whether it would clear the trees. Dylan was too, maybe, and Jude, because they were both also continuing to watch it drift away. It seemed suddenly kind of important that the balloon actually make it up over the trees, that it continue its break to freedom.

It made it. The balloon was up and over the trees and pretty soon was out of sight, and I looked down at Dylan. "Do you want another one?" I asked him, even though he couldn't then and he couldn't now and maybe he couldn't ever actually answer a question like that. He has buttons on his iPad now to say "yes" or "no" in response to a question, but he's never actually said "yes" or "no" in response to a question, either in person or through the iPad. These days, when he's 14 and maybe some of the surliness and isolation is part of being a teenager instead of being autistic, he says "go" when he doesn't want whatever you're selling. "Do you want to go outside?" "Go." Which doesn't actually mean "go outside," it means "go away from me and stop bothering me."

But I asked him anyway. We have to make an effort to include Dylan in life because it's easy to forget that Dylan is a person who can hear and respond and think and has his own life and is part of yours. He's so quiet 90% of the time and doesn't talk and doesn't answer back when you ask him questions mostly (unless to say "go). There are times, sure, when Dylan is very extremely present in your life, but those stories are for another day, and for the most part unless you are going way out of your way to keep him involved, he's just not there, really. It's easy to talk about things around Dylan and never think about the fact that you're talking about things around him. We've had conversations about what Santa Claus will be getting for the boys, talking just smack-dab in front of him without even worrying about it. Sometimes I'll say "We shouldn't talk about this in front of Dylan," but then we do anyway. I wonder, sometimes, if Dylan is sad that he learned early on that Santa is (spoiler alert) not real, if he's good at keeping secrets so he lets Jude believe even now, at 14. Then I remember that so far as anyone knows, Dylan can't talk. So he couldn't tell Jude even if he wanted to, but I bet he doesn't want to. Dylan once punched a goat because he thought it was stealing from Jude. Jude was trying to feed the goat, but still.

I sometimes wonder if Jude really believes in Santa Claus, too, at 14, but only sometimes and not for long as I am 99.9% certain that he thinks Santa Claus is an actual real person who actually really brings him his toys on Christmas Eve, and it's kind of nice, actually, that someone could believe that for so long and even nicer that we can usually manage to keep the illusion alive and Santa actually brings him the exact things he wants, even if those things require us to order obscure Elmo Play-Doh things from a guy on eBay.

Dylan didn't seem to want another balloon, judging by his unbothered reaction to his balloon now being gone in the sky. But Jude wanted in on the action. Looking at me, he said "Me too?" I decided, sure, why not, and he let his balloon go. A lady walking by said "Oh, no!" and we all briefly looked at her before I said "It's okay," without explaining, and then we watched Jude's balloon follow after Dylan's, rising up and across the street. The wind was maybe a little weaker, so Jude's balloon cleared the scrub trees easily, the way Jude seems to do things more easily than Dylan almost all the time.

Their older siblings often think that Jude isn't actually "all that autistic," because they see Jude only when he's around us and around Dylan, and compared to Dylan, Jude isn't "all that autistic." But we've seen Jude on field trips and while participating in science fairs and when swimming at the pool with friends or on the rare occasion when we run into someone he knows at the store and he runs up and hugs them, or used to, until maybe he got the idea that 7th- and 8th-graders don't really want you hugging them at the grocery store. I get it, because I was a 7th and 8th grader, but I still resent them a little for it. Nobody ever wanted to rush up to me and hug me in a grocery store when I was in 8th grade and wore the same maroon sweatshirt over my tshirts nearly every day in class and read "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" and ran for student class president even though my mom asked me in that way she had whether I really wanted to do that and did I think I could win, so I'm not sure how I would've reacted, but kids today are supposed to be more open to different lifestyles, so maybe the cool kids today could still let a bighearted 8th grader who's happy to see them give them a hug when he runs into them in front of the boxes of macaroni that you can buy 5 for $2.

Jude, more advanced or whatever than Dylan, is still not in sync with his other classmates. He struggles with language and social situations and lacks the social maturity that they have, which is tough when you're 14 and becoming aware of girls and wanting to date them but you also want to spend a lot of your time playing with marble racing sets and inventing movies in which kids in your class form an army to fight Disney villains, creating movie posters in which people in your family will fill the positions of producer and casting director.

Back then, when they first started freeing balloons, Jude was more advanced than Dylan, too. He learned his alphabet sooner, playing a game on the computer with Mom, pressing the letters to make the computer say "a" and play a little skit involving the letter "a." Dylan mostly didn't pay attention to Jude or the alphabet -- the alphabet having become another obsession of Jude's early on -- but he would come watch when Jude hit "Q" and a queen would come marching across the screen to royal fanfare. Americans have always been obsessed with royalty, I guess.

Since that time, we have released countless balloons back into the wild. Sometimes as soon as we leave the dollar store, sometimes out the car window on the way home, sometimes later on, like when we leave for our ride before bedtime. It's always the same. Dylan takes his balloon and heads outside, and as soon as he's clear of the store or garage or what-have-you, he lets the balloon go, and then watches as it rises and floats away. Once it's out of sight, he turns away, with no emotion showing whatsoever. He's neither happy nor sad. It's just a thing he did.

I watch, too. I watch as the balloons drift away. Sometimes they head up fast, nearly straight up, dwindling into nothingness pretty quickly up there. Other days, they head out horizontally, crossing a lot of ground before they head upwards, skimming over trees and houses and roads. We can see those for longer. I know that makes no sense. It doesn't matter if a balloon is 1,000 feet above you or 1,000 feet away; it should be equally visible regardless. Right? But the ones that head off cross-country can be seen for longer than the ones that shoot for the stars right away.

Like I said, I find myself thinking about them. I came up with what I thought was a pretty good question once, about the balloons. The question was this:

If you let a balloon float away, is it littering now, or does it only become illegal after it comes down?

I mentioned that to someone, one time, and they gave me a weird look and didn't seem to get it.

It seemed wrong at first when the boys would let their balloons go but now it seems wrong to keep them. I've started buying balloons as decorations for parties, when we have parties. They aren't really "parties," since they involve only our kids and now our grandkids and their significant others. We moved into our house two years ago. Since then, the only non-relatives who have been in the house are two of Joy's old friends, and a couple of her "old lady" friends she met at the health club. And a woman who comes as respite worker once a week to watch the boys for two hours so Joy can have a small break. The state pays her $16 per hour, per kid, which is a pretty good thing. I only recently found out that we pay into the program which pays her, and now I have to try to avoid analyzing whether we are getting a deal on it. I can't let myself stop to think out how much we pay into the program and then measure how much we get out of it to see if we should pay her the $16 per hour ourselves and buy the special-needs three-wheeled bike ourselves for $1,500 because when you put "special needs" in front of something you can charge 300% more than you would otherwise and if you don't think that's true you can check it out for yourself because it is. I didn't ask Joy how much we pay into the program, one of the blind spots in our budget, blind spots I allow to exist because we don't really have a budget so much as we have a record of our wildly overspending ourselves to get things like the King Kong (2005) Board Game (TM) and chewable little letters that we give Dylan to hold in his mouth when he starts punching himself.

I buy, say, twenty or twenty-five balloons at the Dollar Store for a party. Sometimes they don't have enough of the type of party we want. They might have only 20 Happy Birthday balloons ready, but my aversion to interacting with people is so great, and it is already so awful and tedious watching the cashier pull down each balloon by the string and try to scan it's little tab into the register, something they do inexplicably because I know they could just punch "25" and then scan one, but I expect they have to do it that way so that the computer can automatically inventory what is being bought and save money somewhere allowing them to keep selling me junk and balloons for a $1, so I don't say anything but the upshot of that combined with what honestly is a crippling social anxiety that I mask well by pretending it doesn't exist is that I would really rather not ask the Dollar Store people to blow up five more birthday balloons, so I fill out the bunch with some generic balloons that are flowers or stars or whatever they have. A birthday party might include a couple of "it's a boy" balloons which, I guess, okay, because why are those just for when the kid is first born? It's still a boy twenty-two years later.

The boys make you rethink everything you ever believed, constantly. Things you kind of took for granted all your life suddenly aren't necessarily set in stone. Why do we hold onto balloons? Why aren't they made for buying and immediately releasing? Eventually you're going to either release it or kill it or watch it die anyway, right? If you buy a balloon and take it home, what then? You keep it for a few days and then... throw it out? Pop it? Let it go? Since Dylan and Jude came along, letting it go somehow seems the more humane thing. When I'm pulling them out of that weird ceiling-cage the balloons are kept in at the Dollar Store, I'm already thinking how they're going to be trapped in my car for a couple hours, then trapped in our house for a while, and then, slowly -- one or two each time we go outside -- they'll be set free to drift away into the sky, flying off all silver and shiny and flipping around, the string dangling behind them as they clear the trees and head into the blue. They slowly get smaller and smaller, a tiny pinprick dot off in the distance and then they are gone, and a little boy who is not so little anymore turns away and gets into the car and turns on his tablet and starts watching the same 15-second part of Despicable Me over and over again while waiting for me to take him for a ride around the route we drive every night before bed. I linger a bit and try to see if I can see where it went, staring up into the sky. It might look like I'm staring at nothing but I'm not. I'm looking at a balloon. Even if I can't actually see it anymore, I'm still looking at it.