For one Friday at the end of September, New Braunfels shuts down for an entire day to celebrate a county fair and the agricultural roots it represents. The city government stops, all but essential services are halted, and the public school systems (and most private) are closed so that workers and students can participate in the parade that begins in one of the oldest neighborhoods in town (ours), and trails down one of the town’s old main streets, circles the town square (in New Braunfelsian German, “the plotz”—which sounds, to those few Woody Allen fans still living, like a very unpleasant digestive system problem) and on down across to the Comal River’s narrow, and old, bridge, to peter out near one of the town’s oldest parks and tubing chutes and the city’s newest, internationally renowned “waterpark,” Schlitterbahn (that’s German for water road, I believe).
I’ve always managed to take work off for fair day when Colin and his despicable sister Chloe, whom he didn’t yet despise, were small: in part because his pediatric neurologist encouraged us to expose him to as many social and public occasions as possible.
This “exposure” also meant that, when the marching band passed and the brass section stopped right in front of us (as it always did) to perform a number, I would have to pull Colin off the curb and across the street as the noise provided an unbearable sensory event for him. He screamed, and, even more frequently to my memory, melted into profuse tears.
Now, like many other high functioning autistics, he’s gotten used to tolerating sensations and sounds that were unbearable (while new ones become bothersome, ones like say, rain). Now, he actually marches in the band himself, not far from his anathema, the brass section, while playing his woodwind instrument, the clarinet. And his despicable sister has begun marching as of year before last, with whatever gymnastics or dance groups she participates in. The effect upon me and my husband is that we both have to take off work to pick up kids, and now, with Colin, to run errands for him between the parade and his band’s performance at the Comal County Fair, and shortly after, his trip to another school to perform at yet another High School Football game.
So Fair Day is now called Unfair Day, at least for all band parents and members because it is so unnervingly busy and chaotic. And it was unfair, in the sense that, for the first time since we have lived in this “burg,” half of the parade was pelted with that sensorily loaded disaster for Colin: one more time that’s rain.
Which we sat in, and somehow, he got through. Along with the other wet-haired band members, cheerleaders, Fair Queens (“Hello, Queen’s,” he’d yelled at them on another parade day years earlier), floats, and passels of western style outfitted horses and riders.
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| The Mighty Unicorn Marching Band (Colin is not in the pic, but we can pretend he is . . .) |
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| Yes, I'm fascinated by giant, stuffed mascot suits and strange blue icons. Oh yes, and there are cheerleaders to the left, and a kid in purple that Colin's evil sister Chloe knows from school to the right. |
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| The people in the middle of the street dance with chairs. The ones with their backs to us sit in them. |
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| Hello, Queens! |
And here’s Colin’s assessment of the 2010, Comal County Parade:
The parade went quite well although it rained a little but stopped so luckily we got to make it through the parade. The rain did excite some people and I could tell because some of the other band members were cheering and hollering. So we headed under the shade for a few moments. I heard some of the band players sing a song that we played at the game called hey baby. As we marched along the streets we played a pattern of fight song and march grandioso until we got to the center block thats when we played part 1 of what goes around comes around. When the parade was over I almost felt like I got out of the shower because I was sweating so hard that my hair was wet and I wanted to take off my jacket.
And because Colin forgets, right along with many other, neurotypical 15-year-old boys, much of what he’s supposed to tell me, and because, even more than other 15-year-olds he hasn’t kept up with the very clothing he needs, clothing being a thing High School and most Middle School boys are finally noticing, I had to make two additional trips to and from the High School: first to buy him a Pep Rally shirt he had already bought (that I had absolutely never seen) and a garment bag (about which he had absolutely no clue) for the trip to the “away” football game that night.
Thankfully, one of his other 15-year-old school mates who’s also a family friend did know about the shirts and the garment bag in particular (God bless your, soul, Clayton). All this because when I gave Colin his new pep rally shirt and asked about his garment bag before the parade, he held up a small, thin, plastic covering and said, “This is my gauntlet bag.”
He does have gauntlets, along with garments, to be fair. However, staring at that bag whose weight equaled a measure of Saran Wrap, I realized, again, that something was off-kilter in his view of fashion and its accoutrements.
After the parade, as per normal, I was the only parent/old person circling through the first band hall, into the second band hall, out into the hall, and back into the first band hall, looking for my child to make sure he got his garment bag, which I’d had to buy separately from the pep rally shirt. And Clayton, our savior (again) had to find Colin for me. I hated to seek Clayton’s help because, really, I don’t want to stigmatize Clayton or Colin by making public my association with them. They are teenaged boys. And middle-aged moms are not cool beings in the world of teenage boys.
But, after the parade and an hour that consisted of 10 real-time minutes trying to slouch and appear nonchalant--read inconspicuous--as I roved about halls and band halls jammed with band kids eating lunches, I had to ask. Then, pointed in the right direction through a room of percussion boys trading Beavis and Butthead laughs (and I know they were doing it on purpose—they’re smart, those band kids), I saw that Colin’s face was flushed and his eyes, through my mom-o-scopic vision, looked red. Let’s face it: I am a mother, and when I see my child is possibly upset and I know he has autism, and again, I’m a mother, I want to make sure he’s not needing a tranquilizer/escape route.
Try edging up to your teenager in a crowd of other teens without looking like the worried parent you are. Try talking to any teenager who won’t look directly at you to acknowledge whether or not they have heard you speak to ask how they are “doing.” Add to that the fact that you can’t look at the teen with too much concern because having your mom track you down in a room stuffed with other teens is humiliating enough.
Still I persisted in pursuing him to give him his garment (not gauntlet) bag prior to the band’s performance at the Fair because he was supposed to have one and use it for the trip after the performance. Seeing his red face, I thought, predictably, that the worst had happened: that he was upset and having a nervous breakdown. Forget that marching in a parade in what is, environmentally speaking, still the summer in and, that’s right, in rain in Texas would have made him flushed and red.
He was okay, he said. He said this at least twice to my entreaties. Nor could I use language that would sound like I was talking much about feelings. Female clarinetists surrounded us in that corner of jumbled cases and music stands. Plus the percussion section was behind me, Beavis and Buttheading away.
So I had to back off, believing him, and praying, but only after reminding him, soto voce, that he could go to the directors or any adult and say he needed out of a situation.
And he nodded and grunted and turned to his locker to stash his garment bag.
Driving back through streets of slowly unclotting traffic, I worried, but, what to do? I had the small bottle of tranquilizers his pediatric neurologist had prescribed him after we reported that Colin had punched a hole inside the car door on a long ride home through the freezing West Texas that spring/winter. Nine hours in an unheated Honda Civic in 15 degree weather had finally proven too much for him somewhere around Ballinger (deer hunter-land in West Texas). We’d been in Lubbock for Roger’s dad’s funeral and, when his mother died a month later, also in Lubbock, we wanted to have a neurological “hall pass” for Colin.
The best I could do and can still is to be wherever he is, which next, meant the Comal County Fairgrounds.
However, by the time Roger got Chloe from her parade drop-off spot, and we regrouped at the house, we were running late. In a rush, we paid five dollars to park for an hour as close to the gate as we could and bustled through dusty air saturated by the smell of buttered corn cobs, bratwurst and pork chops on-a-stick, and beer. By the time we made it to the Corral, or performance venue, the band was already in place and playing. They were also, I saw, wearing shirts that matched the one I’d procured earlier that morning (first trip, before odyssey with garment bag).
They were also wearing blue jeans, raiment not on my emailed list of necessary items (to my memory). As most of the band, but not all (Colin included here), were standing, I worried that his shorts were what made him a seated clarinetist. As he was on the third row back, I couldn’t tell what he wore on his lower half right away. But he was playing his instrument and not convulsing in a corner in a fit of nervous anxiety, so, point for Colin. Then he did stand and I saw he was wearing blue jeans like the rest of band and thought: a miracle, he remembered something without me. Progress!
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| Entire band performing at the fair. |
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| Colin's dead center, once again, next to the girl whose shades have bright blue ear pieces. He sits by her a lot. |
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| Dad/Roger on left, Colin in his "precariously perched pants" to the right. |
However, as he slouched away with the band to return to the band hall to leave for that night’s performance an hour-and-a-half away in Austin, I noticed that those miraculous blue jeans were slipping down precariously. Roger saw me noticing, and said, “He got them from the lost and found.”
So much for that miracle.
But he was dressed appropriately. And he had been there performing with the band at the Fair, and he’d been reasonably content. After a point, what more can you ask for?
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