David Hare-Scott wrote:
You don't get to choose your relatives ain't it wonderful you can choose
your friends.


snipped


I laughed. I nearly cried. I shook my head and scratched it. I got no
nearer to really understanding but ended up thinking that there but for
fortune go I. Will he take more care with the little bottles in the
medicine cabinet in future? There is no certainty.

David.

LOL! My son, aged 33, has Asperger's syndrome and that's exactly the
sort of thing he'd be likely to do. Once, he put (thick, waxy) ear drops
in his eyes! 'Absent minded' doesn't really cover it. It's more, as you
say, 'other worldly'.

Two points I'd like to make, though. After a lifetime of knowing such
people, I've come to realise they're indispensable to the rest of us.
They see things either in such minute detail or in such an enormous
context, they're mind-blowing in their very specific areas of expertise.

When my son was one year old, he was absolutely silent. He never said
'Mama' or 'Dada' or *anything*! Yet, at the same time, he could complete
quite complicated jigsaw puzzles *upside down* (ie without the pattern
showing, just the blank back). He can play seven different musical
instruments (piano, violin, clarinet, flute, harp, bass recorder and
guitar) quite well, yet he has difficulty telling the time. He paints,
knits, embroiders, gardens - yet no one will employ him because he is so
'absent minded'. Oh, and if he goes walking on a lawn, he will usually
come back with a fistful of four-leaf clovers because they 'leap out' at
him from the grass. ;-D

The other point I'd like to make is that my Nanna used to dose us up
with a fat spoonful of eucalyptus oil in sugar whenever we got the
sniffles. We never died. Quite recently, I found out that EO is
poisonous. Makes me wonder now about my Nanna... =:-0

--
Trish Brown {|:-}

Newcastle, NSW, Australia