Dancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love

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Dancing down Memory Lane rouses the power of love

Chris paved the way. I didn’t know this when he was alive, how one human being would alter us, how one human being would show us a world we might have looked away from had we not known him.

This dawned on me as I sat with my family at the wedding of Chris’s grandnephew a few weeks ago. And this realization has stayed with me, that Chris McLean didn’t change just my family and me. He opened the eyes of everyone who knew him. And then everyone who knew him opened even more eyes.

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Lucy overcomes her fears to swirl with her curls

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Lucy overcomes her fears to swirl with her curls

I wasn’t with Lucy when she got her longed-for curly hair. Her mother took her to the appointment — which lasted for hours — where Lucy’s hair was washed and combed and cut, then set in rollers and squirted with solution. Then there was sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting, then more solution and more waiting, and washing and conditioning and drying.

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We need to find ways to carry on in our changed world

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We need to find ways to carry on in our changed world

A friend, just back from a week in Arizona and still on Mountain Standard Time, was saying that he felt tired. But it was more than tired. He shook his head. He couldn’t explain.

He followed up with a description of Phoenix with its flat streets and the mountains surrounding it and his trip to the Grand Canyon and the joy of being with family after so long a time. He was animated talking about these things. But it’s his first observation that stayed with me. He was tired, yes, but he was more.

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Cheers for unstoppable Lucy, as she graduates from high school

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Cheers for unstoppable Lucy, as she graduates from high school

The words always come. That’s what I tell myself when I can’t find them. I sit. I think. And I wait. And when the words still won’t come? I ask myself what it is that I am struggling so hard to say?

Maybe this time what I’m struggling to say is simply thank you. Thank you, world. Thank you, Canton High. Thank you, friends and relatives and neighbors and teachers and doctors and dance instructors and used-to-be strangers who have walked this road with us, sometimes many times, leading the way.

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An ‘angel flying too close to the ground’ gets to soar

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An ‘angel flying too close to the ground’ gets to soar

Sometimes, when I am trying to cross the street in front of my house, I count the cars that whiz past. Forty-eight is my all-time high. Mostly it’s about 30 before someone lets me cross. I live on what used to be a country road but is now a busy cut-through. By the time I get from my front yard to the sidewalk across the street, I’m generally sour on the human race. That’s one reality. Here is another…

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Love is like night vision. It gives us new eyes

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Love is like night vision. It gives us new eyes

I flew to California the day before her birthday. It was a big birthday, her 16th. And I was sad leaving her.

"I already miss you," I moaned when I kissed her goodbye. Lucy looked at me and smiled, cocked one eyebrow and said, "Save it for Farley," which is Lucy teasing, Lucy pretending to like Farley (a favorite teacher) more than she likes me. It's a game she invented, something she says when she wants to get a rise out of me, her words a joke.

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When Joy Triumphs over Our Worst Fears

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When Joy Triumphs over Our Worst Fears

My granddaughter Lucy was born in June 2003, not so long ago, but it was before Facebook, before World Down Syndrome Day, before companies hired models with Down syndrome, before the TV show “Born This Way,” before Google was a verb making it easy for people to network and learn. Lucy was seven hours old when a doctor, who didn’t identify himself as a doctor, walked into my daughter’s hospital room, unswaddled Lucy and announced…

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Learning to Look a Little Deeper to Discover a True Treasure

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Learning to Look a Little Deeper to Discover a True Treasure

'You plant black-eyed peas, that's what you git," my daughter's friend says in an Oklahoma drawl she exaggerates whenever she wants to make a point. I laughed when I first heard this phrase some 20 years ago, but it's a saying our family quickly adopted.

I found myself thinking these words while listening to my granddaughter Lucy belt out the score from "Gypsy" on our drive home from seeing…

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Learning to appreciate the moment

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There is such joy in Lucy. I don't always see it. Sometimes I'm too focused on improving her, reminding her to stand up straight, to look a person in the eye when she's saying hello and goodbye, to slow down her words when she talks.

"Can you say that again, Lucy?" "Where are your shoes?" "Did you brush your teeth?" "Do you have your seat belt buckled?" Always on her case but for her own good, right?

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Splendid scenery on a winding road

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My granddaughter, Lucy, has Down syndrome. When she was born 11 years ago and I heard these words, I was shattered.

Stereotypes take a long time to die. My head was full of them, despite knowing Chris McLean, who has Down syndrome and has been part of our extended family for more than 40 years, despite having watched the television series "Life Goes On" and seeing how much a person with Down syndrome can accomplish.

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Buddy Walk raises awareness, not just money

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October is Down Syndrome Awareness Month. It is also Disability Awareness Month, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Bullying Prevention Month, AIDS Awareness Month, and Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

And the list continues. Every month is full of awareness events.

I'm aware that all these events cause traffic jams. When I'm stuck on Storrow Drive or at the end of my busy street, I sometimes think, "What now?"

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An almost perfect day in spring

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An almost perfect day in spring

My husband says I would know if I swallowed an ant. I'm not so sure. Right up until the ant, it had been a perfect day. Sunshine. Warmth. I got to play in my garden for the first time in so long that I had forgotten how the earth smells in spring: new like the top of an infant's head; fresh, like my dog Molly's breath when we first met her, when she was just 6 weeks old…

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It takes a face to change a heart

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A few days ago, six of us were eating and talking about Rob Portman, the US senator from Ohio who had just announced that after a lifetime of opposing gay marriage, he had changed his mind.

His son had come out, and he had given gay marriage more thought, and I was dissing him for this, not for his change of opinion but for seeing the light only because his son, not someone else's, was gay.

And that's when my friend and teacher John O'Neil made me see the light. "It takes a face to change a heart," he said quietly.

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