The Ride Together by Judy Karasik & Paul Karasik

Author:Judy Karasik & Paul Karasik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

11 The Stooges

12 The Big Yellow Balloon

The first time David was ever in my charge I was twenty-seven years old and he was thirty-two. One Friday in September I came down from New York, where I now worked as a book editor, to cover for my parents while they took a week’s vacation on the Vineyard.

Pop was in a good mood that Friday night. He was looking forward to a holiday and he and Joan had finally found a place for David. The place wouldn’t be ready until the following spring, as soon as construction was completed on a new residential hall—but this looked like a long-term solution.

It was a place in western Pennsylvania called Brook Farm, run by a couple named Rudolph and Diane Zarek.

The Zareks had known David from a day program he’d been in that Diane had run years back. When Joan reminded them of David’s condition the Zareks said, “No problem; that’s exactly the kind of person we want to help.” They had a big piece of land in the countryside and gotten a good staff together and trained and the place was up and running. Brook Farm was not as close to the family as my parents would have liked—a good two-hour drive each way—and it took a large chunk of our capital, but the distance wasn’t impossible and, Monroe explained, considering what it was buying, neither was the money. David would have the possibility of a better life, more to do, more people to be friendly with, more people who would help him to develop better control over the things that agitated and hurt him so much.

Michael and Paul and I had all left home and now our oldest brother would, too.

“Have I got something to show you, Judy,” said my father. We were sitting in the study. Pop put out his cigarette tidily—Monroe had boasted for years that he could quit smoking whenever he felt like it; apparently he also believed that possessing the ability to quit was an acceptable substitute for actually doing it—and picked up a newspaper clipping he had kept to show me.

A woman had written in to a helpful household-hints column explaining that she had found a time saver—instead of wasting precious time slicing banana into chunks for the family’s morning cereal, she now used a potato masher. With one stroke the job was done!

“I tried it,” said Monroe, smiling like a well-fed cat. “It does not cut the banana. It flattens the banana. The most outrageous thing about this pinheaded little female is that she truly believes that she is too busy to slice a banana in the morning. Who in the world is too busy to slice a banana?”

Finding Brook Farm was a lucky break, because David had been discharged from his day program the year before. Joan, in her early sixties, and Monroe, nearly seventy, were watching out for him at home.

Despite the fact that in the last few years the people working with David had

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