You don't get to choose your relatives ain't it wonderful you can choose
your friends.

An older relative of mine has always been a little odd, other-worldly you
might say. But life would be so dull without the eccentric so it has never
really concerned me. I need to leave my options open here as I might
qualify myself some time.

This bloke is not suffering dementia nor does he drink to excess or any
such as far as I can tell. He knows who you are, where he is and what he is
doing. He travels about the city alone quite happily and does all the
normal domestic things one does. He can remember what he did yesterday,
last month etc. He is charming and in his own field quite erudite.

He phoned his sister the other day to say goodbye. She asked why. He said
he was dying because he had just drunk poison. After some frantic
questioning it transpired that he had gone to the medicine cabinet to get
some cough syrup and pulled out the eucalyptus oil by mistake. He then
poured a dessert spoon full and drank it!

Even if you don't read the label how can you not notice the spoon of stuff
in front of your face is not cough syrup but eucalyptus oil? Having taken
it how can your next act be to phone your sister to say goodbye cruel world?
So she called the poisons information line and they said to be calm, do not
induce vomiting, that he would be in for a bad night but the results would
not leave any lasting harm. They were correct: the result was - how can I
put this delicately - powerful. But once the stuff had run its course, or
should I say blasted and slalomed its course, he was OK.

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.

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

On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:33:01 +1000, Trish Brown wrote:


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

Yep, the jig-saws are the give away he has excellent skills at shape
recognition. So long as the jigsaw has every piece cut in a unique shape,
anyone can do it. Us mere mortals prefer the assistance of colour
matching as well.

Music has patterns,



--

Great advances in Debian Linux; post a bug report and get spam in three
days.

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

An older relative of mine has always been a little odd, other-worldly you
might say. But life would be so dull without the eccentric so it has
never really concerned me. I need to leave my options open here as I
might qualify myself some time.

This bloke is not suffering dementia nor does he drink to excess or any
such as far as I can tell. He knows who you are, where he is and what he
is doing. He travels about the city alone quite happily and does all the
normal domestic things one does. He can remember what he did yesterday,
last month etc. He is charming and in his own field quite erudite.

He phoned his sister the other day to say goodbye. She asked why. He
said he was dying because he had just drunk poison. After some frantic
questioning it transpired that he had gone to the medicine cabinet to get
some cough syrup and pulled out the eucalyptus oil by mistake. He then
poured a dessert spoon full and drank it!

Even if you don't read the label how can you not notice the spoon of stuff
in front of your face is not cough syrup but eucalyptus oil? Having taken
it how can your next act be to phone your sister to say goodbye cruel
world? So she called the poisons information line and they said to be
calm, do not induce vomiting, that he would be in for a bad night but the
results would not leave any lasting harm. They were correct: the result
was - how can I put this delicately - powerful. But once the stuff had
run its course, or should I say blasted and slalomed its course, he was
OK.

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.

He sounds perfectly normal to me :-)) But then I live with a man whose own
daughter says is an alien. I've not only tolerated but also thoroughly
enjoyed the company of my alien for 40 years (but even I sometimes wonder
how he managed to not only get, but then to hold down a very responsible,
highly paid job for so many decades).

He makes me laugh. Not always intentionally but when I point out the alien
nature of yet another thing he's just done, even he is capable of chuckling
after I explain it to him.

Bless your rellie.

Charlie wrote:
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.

Ahhh.....celebrate the diversity, David!


I do appreciate this sentiment.


Your relative sounds delightfully wonderful to me. Not cut of the
same cloth as the rest of the world about him? Excellant!

I agree with Fran on this, and Trish. One of my 6 yr old grandson's
best friends has Asperger's and comes about often and is a delight to
be with and could be described as eccentric and otherwordly and
"alien"...at seven years of age!


And I appreciate him as an individual, we have had some delightful chats
over a scotch or two (he also has a hollow leg).

Does your relative appreciate the writings of one of our great cynics,
IMO? Mark Twain. And others who chose the "other road"?


The road less travelled is quite a familiar one to me. I wasn't suggesting
that we should all be the same. Perish the thought. Taking that route
doesn't mean you have to be so careless of reality that you Darwin yourself
from the gene pool..

David