What’s the difference between not being politically correct and being unconscionable? I mean, don’t we all have our little points of vulnerability here?  I mean it’s okay for me to laugh at being old, but…you?

 It’s obviously the pits if one should get a laugh  at someone developmentally delayed–like when  my Downs daughter, decked out to the wazoo in a great variety of Ohio State University paraphernalia chatted happily with the Ohio University’s new president at the International Street Fair…and then later helped carry the groceries from Krogers and put them in the wrong but identical car and even took out their trash.  I’ve laughed at myself all my life but I guess thagt’s to be expected, given who I am. But honestly, I know that much of the time it’s outrageous that I’m laughing instead of being appalled.

Seriously, I suspect that I was born with a tad of Tourette’s Syndrome. My father had it when he drank cheap wine and they say his father had it, but I was too young to notice.

I can’t show you the quirks I’ve overcome because I may start them  up again–it’s sufficiently dangerous to even recall them–but I do remember sitting in the congregation of the okld Methodist church of my childhood struggling with myself and the Devil not to shout out obscenities (though at that age they would have had minimal effect).

Although it’s not funny, for years I quietly and invisibly traced around the edge of things that fell within my puriew–both with my eyes and correspondingly, without noticeable movement, with a finger. Maybe all the foregoing is an apology for having laughed so hard and long at an article in the New Yorker–I think it was–about a gathering or convention or something–of folks with Tourette’s. I don’t believe the article was meant to be funny (how could it be?)  and though I’ve tried to find it again on Google to no avail, I’ve decided that’s the pits for me. There now, you know, you dingaling!   (Stronger word deleted  by blog editor).