I Just Love His Ideas.
I have DPPV, which sounds awful, but it’s not. It’s just this inner ear thing that causes me to sometimes feel dizzy for no good reason.
So for a week, I’ve been having this DPPV – again – and I know what it is, but I can’t help thinking, What if this time, it’s a brain tumor? Then I worry that I will die in my sleep.
And my next worry is Shane. I can keep myself up for hours with the thought that I might die, and no one will be here to take care of Shane.
My husband, Bill, is a wonderful man. He takes care of the house and the cars, plus he runs a bank in his spare time. He’s kind and caring and compassionate. He’s smart, funny and polite. He’s a great role model.
But he is also a lot like Dylan. In a way, this is great. He’s a genius and can figure out anything. He can fix anything. But he has to be reminded about simple stuff, like throwing away the rotten food in the fridge. Things are in piles everywhere because he doesn’t throw anything away, and he doesn’t organize anything. And Bill is distracted by everything. So he can relate well to Dylan.
Shane is another story. Shane is calm and reserved and quiet. When he does choose to speak, Bill talks right over him.
At dinner, Shane will say, “Remember that time when…” and Bill will blurt, “So what did everyone do in school today?” in his booming voice. He simply doesn’t hear him, even when the two of them are alone.
Shane is an introvert. Like me, he prefers solitude and deep thought to being swallowed up by a large group of people. Bill is an extrovert, and gets his energy from people. Bill can’t understand being exhausted by people, or wanting to step away from them for clarity. Bill loves Shane deeply. He just doesn’t always know how to listen.
Shane is also a genius, but things come to him in a rather inside-out way. His thinking jumps from tiny details directly to life-affirming profundities. Shane’s thoughts are sometimes so monumental that only a handful of people could grasp them out of context. They’ll start with something simple and end with something very deep – and most people get the simple but miss the deep.
This is not a real example. But Shane will say something out-of-the-blue like, “I think that the evil guy from the movie last night is just like Snape from Harry Potter. Because even though Snape isn’t really evil, he said that thing about treating Harry like any other student. And Harry isn’t really like any other student, which is just like when the evil guy looked at the girl and smiled and did that thing with his eyebrows. He knows more than pure evil, you know?”
And I will, oddly enough, know exactly what Shane is talking about, and be able to then do a comparison between the two characters, and we will talk for awhile about what constitutes good and what constitutes evil.
Bill, however, would say “uh-huh” – like he does to me – then ask if Shane thinks it is going to rain today.
When Shane was in kindergarten, his teacher made a comment that stuck with me because it was the first time I realized that Shane was like me. She said, “I just love his ideas. They’re so out-of-the-box.”
Up until kindergarten, I thought Shane was the only normal person in the family. When she said that, I realized that he was just different in the same way that I was different – which is why it is so easy for me to relate to him.
He needs me. So it’s a good thing I’m feeling less dizzy today.