Dear John

(Re: Late Winter / Early Spring 2010)

I saw the movie and read the book Dear John by Nicholas Sparks.  Want to know what stood out to me?  Not the awesome love story.  It was the description of the kid’s dad who has Asperger’s.  It was the first I had heard of it.  Also an A word, but maybe easier to live with.  This guy raised a child in the book, after all.  And he had a job and lived a regular life.  He was intensely interested in coins, to the point where that is all he wanted to do, talk about, and read about.  He had difficulty in social situations – unless you could get him talking about his coin collection.  It reminded me do much of Liam and his train obsession.  The seed was definitely planted in my head that it was a very real possibility that my Liam shared this A word with this fictional character. 

My tears throughout the book and the movie held much more than a reaction to the storyline.

They held fear for my child.