• Sometimes I have a brain malfunction.  It's something about my wiring that makes me stop in the middle of a sentence and forget what I was saying.  Perhaps I am a bit ADOS (AD Oh, Shiny!)  That would be a typical diagnosis for someone who forgets her children's names and leaves a pot of hard-boiled eggs on the stove so long that they explode.  That's normal… isn't it?
• What's not normal is what my son has.  There is no name for his condition.  He also stops in the middle of a sentence, which most often is not an original thought.  He then forgets the rest of it and makes something up; also not an original thought.
• If I give him a choice of two things, he's pretty flexible:  "Whatever floats your… cup of tea."
• If I catch him doing something out of character, he shrugs and says, "When in Rome… let them eat cake."
• Wait a minute.  They ate cake - or didn't, as the case may be - in France, not Rome.  However, if I brought this fact to his attention, he would say, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't lead a horse to water."
• "Um… Okay, then."
• Sometimes, he goes into a "stick phase" and doesn't come out of it for weeks.  I would hear such nonsense as:
• "A bird in the hand is more than you can shake a stick at.
• Or, "Do unto others, and carry a big stick."
• Or, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't carry big sticks."
• Or, the worst one, "The way to a man's heart is…"  I'd better leave that one to your imagination.
• I was never so glad as when the stick phase was over.  It's one thing for someone to butcher clichés all day, and another to butcher clichés by themes… for weeks!
• The "chicken" theme was only a few days.  There isn't much you can do with a chicken, but it still drove me to the brink.
• "Absence makes your chickens hatch."
• "Two wrongs don't make a chicken."

(Continued on page 6)