Dan Part 5

Dan continued to live with my parents and I was in Texas with my husband and son. On April 17, 1991, our daughter, Stacy Marie was born. My parents and Dan took a road trip to Texas. They didn't come right down because one of my parents had a stupid high school reunion in Nebraska at the time Stacy was born that they deemed more important, but since this is about Dan, I'll leave out my editorial comments regarding that and save it for another blog. They came down when Stacy was about 3 months old. This time we were living in a house, so mom, dad and Dan stayed in the house with us. Dan stayed in what was later to become Stacy's room (and the room he would stay in years later when he came to live with us). Dan didn't pull any 'stunts' like the one I described in my last blog about him. In fact, the visit was uneventful, except that I had the feeling that would be my parents' last visit to Texas. It was. After that, they deemed themselves too old to travel, even for high school reunions.

Dan continued living with them at home and doing lots of stuff for them around the house. In fact, he was a tremendous help to them. When we would travel up to Ohio to visit them, we stayed with my mother-in-law, who had plenty of space in her condo. We would go and visit them and would come to Ohio around Dan's birthday. That way we could celebrate Dan's birthday on June 29th and Steve's grandma's birthday on July 5th. Steve would always take Dan to the store of his choice and let him get a few CD's as a birthday present. Well Dan really liked 'Circuit City.' I don't know why, Dan takes a liking to something or someone and there's no logical reason. So, Steve would take Dan to 'Circuit City' for his birthday. We would always go out to dinner at Bob Evans for his birthday because that's where Dan wanted to go. He could order whatever he wanted and I remember him one time, ordering a HUGE pile of mashed potatoes. Then, they had presented him with a large birthday cake of which he had a HUGE piece. I wondered how he could put that much food away in one sitting. My husband wondered the same thing.

Dan also liked their neighbor, Mr. Huckins. He looked up to him. They had a charcoal grill that Dan liked and he would love to watch them cook stuff on it. Sometimes, my dad would have Dan spreading wood chips on the gardens around the house and Dan would use that as a perfect opportunity to watch the neighbors have barbecues, so my mom would have to make sure to keep an eye on him and make sure he wasn't too nosy. Dan made up tales of Echo putting out wood chips for dad in the garden while spying on the neighbor's barbecue, accidentally knocking a burger off their grill onto the ground when they weren't looking and hiding the burger in dad's bag of wood chips, then later on, dad would find a mystery burger in with the wood chips. For someone who's mentally retarded, Dan has quite an imagination. Dan still talks about the time we were making his birthday cake and discovered we had no eggs and had to go next door and borrow a couple of eggs from Mrs. Huckins. These people were always really, really nice to Dan and to my parents and I. It was a red-letter day for Dan, we were using the mixer to make his birthday cake and paid a visit to the Huckins family. He can remember the date on which this happened. Dan will remind us that it wasn't the old Sunbeam mixer he liked as a child, they had to get rid of it because the brushes in the motor went bad, that it was a new mixer that mom and dad got, that was used to make his birthday cake..

For the past thirty years or so, Dan has loved barbecues. My dad got a grill from Sears, in fact it's the same grill we have now. I think they got it because Dan likes barbecues so much because they didn't have one when we were kids and Dan wasn't interested in them back then. Sometime after we moved to Texas, Dan got his interest in barbecues. He doesn't care how the burgers are cooked, or how they taste, just that they are cooked on the grill. Dan loved it when he came to live with us in 2002 because we still had our old grill and we kept dad and mom's grill so, for a while, we had two grills. Dan thought that was really cool. We had to get rid of our old grill because it was rusty but as I said earlier, we still have dad and mom's grill.

Dan loved it the time they were visiting us in Texas when we were living in the apartment on Boca Agua in Fort Worth and we bought a grill and had a cookout on the balcony. He can remember the date we got the grill. He can remember the date on which dad got their grill in Ohio.  Whenever mom, dad and Dan came to visit, we always had a barbecue for Dan and when we visited mom, dad and Dan, we had a barbecue for Dan. He still loves barbecues to this very day. The nice part is that he likes cleaning the grill and has happily always been the one to clean the grill. That's perfectly fine with us as long as he waits until it's cooled off and doesn't do it in the heat of the afternoon.

Dan also had a fascination with basement crawl spaces. We had a crawl space in the basement of our old house in Columbus and we had one in the basement of our house in Gahanna.  Here in Texas, basements are as rare as a cool day in July, so we don't have either a basement or a crawl space. My dad kept a wooden cover over the opening to the crawl space in the basement of our Columbus house. Dan loved it when dad took the cover off and Dan would get to look inside. All we had was a bunch of junk in there, but Dan was fascinated. He also had a fascination with attics. When Dan was little, he was always talking about what the attic was like in that house, although we never went up to it. He also loved me telling him about Grandma and Grandpa Briggs' house in Lincoln, Nebraska that had an attic fan and when you turned on the fan, a light would come on in the attic and you could see into the attic. In our Gahanna house, there were two attics because it was a split-level house. The door to one of the attics was in Dan's closet. Dan would take the cover off and look into the attic at the duct pipes, wiring and stuff. One day, Dan left the cover off and one of our cats, Tiger, got into the attic and wouldn't come out. Mom and I got really upset. I think dad was out of town at the time. Somehow, we got Tiger out of there, I don't know how, probably, we lured him out with dried beef. Dan got in big trouble for leaving that door off and didn't take that door off again.  When mom got upset with Dan, dad said she "bulled" at him. I have drawn many cartoons of mom as a bull going after Dan, dressed as a matador.

Before we moved into our house in Gahanna, dad had a builder put a small screen door with a latch over the crawl space in the basement, so we could get in there easily and it wouldn't get too damp in there and our cats couldn't get in there. Dan loved to look in there when he came downstairs to help mom with the laundry. My parents kept their Christmas stuff in there. When I lived at home, Dan loved it at Christmas time when I would go into the crawl space to get the Christmas stuff out. Dan would always be there to help me get the Christmas stuff out.  Before we moved out of that house, I let Dan go a little ways into the crawl space to take a look at it. Dan didn't know how to back out of there, so I talked him down.

Dan also had a fascination with electricity that got dangerous. When my parents, Dan and I first moved into the house in Gahanna, one of the electrical outlets shot out a few sparks for no reason. Dan thought that was cool. Dad had an electrician out to fix the problem. Dan started making up stories about Echo taking half of an extension cord, plugging one end into an outlet and sticking the end with the wires sticking out into the other end of the outlet and making sparks fly. He called it "powing plugs." What got scary was when he cut an extension cord in two and actually started "powing plugs." It would knock out the circuit, but Dan knew how to re-set the circuit breaker. He also knew what was on each circuit, so he wouldn't make the lights go out in whatever room my parents were in. Steve and I discovered this when we were visiting them one summer. Steve gave Dan a VERY stern talking-to. He told Dan how that could start fires in the wall and how he could really hurt himself. He made Dan promise to NEVER do that again. Dan promised and we threw out the cut extension cord. We never told my parents. As to my knowledge, Dan has never done that again.

Dan also had a fascination with air ducts. I don't know why, but he did. Some of the air ducts in our Gahanna house consisted of sheets of metal nailed to the beams in the basement. Dan got fascinated by these sheets of metal. He started making up stories about Echo bending back the sheets of metal so she could see into the air duct. Then Dan started bending back the sheets of metal. Dan knew that he would be in big trouble if mom and dad found out. I don't remember the details, but it got fixed and Dan didn't do that again. I don't think they found out that it was Dan who messed with the sheet metal. I was careful about what was put into Dan's bad stuff stories. If Dan got any wild ideas about Echo, I quickly discouraged them or changed them to something that was just basic slap-stick stuff.

When Dan was real little and we lived in the house in Columbus, we had cold air vents on the floor in the hallway in front of his room. Dan would drop small toys into the cold air vent and since the bottom of the duct was right there, they just sat there, but Dan thought it was funny. Dad would remove the grill on a regular basis and clean out the cold air vent. Dan got a kick out of that too. When we lived in Gahanna,  Dan  figured out if you dropped something down the cold air duct upstairs, that someone in the family room could see it pass through the cold air vent on the way down to the basement. Dan made up all kinds of stories about Echo doing that while mom was having company and the guests seeing stuff like paper towels fluttering down past the cold air vent in the family room. When we found out about his interest in that, we discouraged him from dropping things down the air ducts.

When Dan lived at home with mom and dad, mom used to take Dan on regular visits to the library to encourage Dan to read and keep his mind occupied. I think that was a great idea, but I don't have time to take Dan to and from the library, so for Christmas and birthdays, I get Dan books from Half-Price Books. Dan prefers books about household appliances and books about the human body. He doesn't care for novels. He used to love comic books, but ones he liked included were ones for little kids like Little LuLu, Archie and Dennis The Menace. He doesn't understand the super hero stuff. He also likes 'Calvin and Hobbes.' I have to be careful what kind of cartoon books I get for him because some of the more recent cartoon stuff has humor that he doesn't understand. I also have to be careful what greeting cards to get him because a lot of the humor in greeting cards these days, he doesn't understand. If he saw some of them, he would just look at them blankly and say, "Yes."

To this very day, I have absolutely NO idea what sparks an interest in him. I probably will never know.