Lucas Camilo

Yesterday Lucas lost his second tooth.  He got very excited about the tooth fairy coming, and kept asking us what she would bring.  His cousins had told us about writing letters to the tooth fairy, so when I (Krista) put Lucas to be last night I offered to take dictation.  I grabbed a small piece of scratch paper, but it turned out Lucas had a lot to say.  It was exciting to hear all his thoughts (and slow, because after I wrote each sentence, he would take the letter from me and read it, starting again from “Dear Tooth Fairy” each time.)  As the letter got longer I felt like I had this window – through more words than Lucas usually uses – into his thoughts.  And it occurred to me that he was writing his own sort of blog entry about early August.  So here it is.

Dear Tooth Fairy,

I lost my second tooth today.  Will you bring me a puzzle?  Please.  Thank you for the turtle.  I saw E.T. the walrus at the zoo and aquarium today.  And I lost my tooth at music class.

 I saw the sharks eating.  The elephants were eating grass.  I saw the tiger.  I like to do bowling.  E.T. swam right up to me.

I saw a friend who was playing songs at the festival.  The song was called Miles and Miles. 

We saw Moses the camel.  Moses was sniffing my chair. 

We saw trains in Index.  The trains were carrying airplanes.  We went to the Iron Goat Trail.

I like to do the new dinosaur puzzle.

Love, Lucas

The back-story to most of this is our trip to the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium yesterday, and then our trip to Index, Washington over the weekend.  Index is a tiny town in the North Cascades, just about an hour north east of Seattle.  Our neighbors have a cabin they’ve lent us before, right on the Skykomish river, so we took Lucas out for a weekend trip.  Index is the smallest town in western Washington with about 160 residents, plus the visitors that come to kayak and rock climb in the summer.  There are active train tracks that run through the middle of town, and right by the cabin, so Lucas got to see giant freight trains up close.

We happened to be there for the annual Index Arts Festival, which meant a warm outdoor summer day with 20 or 30 arts vendors set up in tents around the central town park.  There was a stage where local and traveling musicians (we heard blue grass/old-timey musicians who had come all the way from Bellingham) played for audiences that never got bigger than 50 people.

Lucas’s first goal at the festival was to meet dogs, and there were plenty.  We’re used to approaching strangers and asking if Lucas can meet their dogs – we do it all the time, and people are almost always friendly.  But in Index something felt different.  People were not just polite and patient, but it felt like many people were genuinely really excited to meet Lucas.  There was a vendor who did watercolors of animals who loved meeting Lucas and seemed deeply moved that he liked her goose painting.  There was a family visiting Index who came over quickly to meet Lucas and then offered useful suggestions about accessible hikes (ie the Iron Goat Trail).  There were at least three other wheelchair users at the festival, which felt like an unusually high ratio of chair users for such a small town and gathering.  An older woman in a scooter chair was excited to introduce Lucas to the dog that rode around in her lap, and she was impressed to hear Lucas’s voice.  Another family showed Lucas their two big dogs, including a big whining husky, and they all beamed at Lucas as he admired their dogs.

And there were other people, after the festival, who seemed so happy to have Lucas in town.  An older guy with rolled up flannel sleeves leaning out the window of a beat up pickup truck who pulled over to ask “how old is she?” as a way of meeting Lucas, and he told us about his grandnephew.  A younger guy rolling through town on his bike drinking a beer gave Lucas a giant thumbs up.  We spent the drive home trying to decide what it was that made Index so welcoming.  A higher than average number of people with disabilities?  Small town culture?  Working class culture?  Or just a beautiful summer day with nowhere to be and nothing to do except hang out in a park with a few friends and strangers?

Its hard to say how all this registers for Lucas.  He still doesn’t say anything about his differences, or about how people interact with him.  But that of course doesn’t mean it’s not all registering.  He was in a great mood all weekend long, maybe even a little more willing than usual to explore and try new things.  Maybe it was the attitude of strangers that helped him, or maybe he just felt how happy it made his parents to feel so welcomed.