Audiobook Narration, Warm Nonfiction
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Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM) North American (US South) US African AmericanTranscript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
winter mornings are my favorite times in Southern California. The mist from the Ocean plays a game of hide and seek with the sunshine, knowing it cannot win, Not basking as I do in the exquisite joy of the chase today, we both surrender the mist to the warmth of the sun and I, uncharacteristically to the yellow caution light. The red traffic signal lasts two minutes this morning. I am grateful for the delay and the chance to look out at the landscape instead of traffic. The view is splendid mountains boasting golden halos and valleys preening beneath veils of silver fog. I am smugly aware that the rest of the nation is digging out of snowstorms and scraping ice off windshields as my attention is drawn to a young man walking ahead alongside the road. Sudden, powerful emotions flood over me. Tears blur my view of him, and I gripped the steering wheel. Memories begin to flash and rhythmic order across my mind. The rhythm seems to correspond to the tic tac sound of my turn signal. It is a ziff. I'm watching a Siris of family slides on a rapidly changing projector. Each slide reveals a life seen. Each scene contains pain and sorrow. I switch off my radio, but I cannot silence my heart. I have accidentally turned on my windshield wipers, but they don't wipe away my tears. My journey backward in time has been triggered by the lone figure whose back is to me. As he walks forlornly onto the on ramp of Interstate five. His long blond hair is matted and parted in jagged lines. Unq. Owned at 7 30 on this still chilly morning, his stride imposture are painfully familiar, seeming permanently molded by a lifetime of inner torment. Yet they also seem to reflect a private dignity. There is about him, something that suggests vulnerability contain despair and loneliness. I recognize him first by the flood of my feelings before I recognized the dingy white jacket he wears. He is my son. His name is Robert. As Rob came into focus, the mountains and valleys became only a backdrop for the drama of his life. This is his story. No, it is our story. It is not a tale of heroics, success or courage. As society defines those. Neither is it one about the transcendence of the human spirit over evil to some higher plane. It is instead a story about the mere survival of the broken spirit of a very shy, strangely disabled, usually gentle and almost always tormented young man. You know him? You see him in every park in every city across the United States. He is the disheveled young man who retreats, the aluminum cans you have discarded, or the one you barely noticed sweeping the parking lot of a restaurant in exchange for a meal. He is the stranger on a street corner whose eyes you avoid, or the one whose profile you see as he rides woodenly in the back seat of a police car. But make no mistake about him. He has a home. He lives in the heart of his mother. And there, if only there he is a hero, and because my son killed a man, it is Onley there that he is free rob stories written to give voice to him and the men and women like him who don't fit any molds. Neither those society sets for them nor those off criminal. They are the loss people who in desperate moments, made awful decisions for which they will pay the rest of their lives in his story is to express for him what has become his fervent hope. Mom, If just one person is help from reading my story, it will all be worth it. So I begin with acknowledging the courage of the man who is willing to have his most intensely personal flaws exposed to the condemnation of a population he hopes to help but to which he has never felt he belonged. My personal hope is that the reader will gain insight into others who struggle with burdens they cannot lay down. Rob is autistic. He has always been autistic, so he doesn't comprehend a time when he might ever perceived things differently. But he hasn't always been an addict, and so he sees alcohol as the cause of all his problems and wrong decisions. Autism is a strange disorder, many speculate, but no one knows its cause. Perhaps no. Two autistic individuals are like, but the disorder is primarily characterized by the inability to effectively relate to other