It’s not about race

Back in 1990, my dad had a serious fall off a house he was painting and suffered a brutal head injury.

 After several weeks in the hospital they started with things like physical and occupational therapy. I had the benefit of attending his speech therapy where I wheeled my “still no-clue what the hell was going on” Dad into the room.  He was wearing a hat but it was just sitting on the top of his head, not actually around his head.

Speech Therapy is in a giant room with just us in it.  “Us” includes the woman who is the Speech Therapist, me and my dad and we are sitting in front of computer monitor.  She tells my dad that the screen will have two lines on it – one at the top and one at the bottom and they’re going to start slowly moving to the middle of the screen and for my dad to hit the keyboard spacebar when they merge as one line.

He says ok and I put his hand on the spacebar.

The lines were moving about every five seconds and it took them about 30 seconds to finally merge in the middle at which time they don’t move for ten seconds — my dad doesn’t do anything — then the lines split again and go back to the top and bottom of the screen.

She – Mr. Clark, did you see the lines merge? 
Dad – Yes 
She – Why didn’t you hit the space bar? 
Dad – I chose not to

So I try to help the situation by saying “He’s really not into computers so maybe he’s not comfortable (how hard is it to hit the fucking spacebar?).

So she says, sure I understand let’s do another thing. My dad says ok.

Speech Therapist – Mr. Clark, I’m going to name three things and I want you to tell me what they have in common and then I will ask you to name a fourth thing in common with them.

Dad – Ok

Speech Therapist – What do milk, a nurse uniform and snow have in common?

Dad – They’re all white?

Speech Therapist – (ready to shit her pants as she finally got a connection with him) – Yes, great!! — what else goes with that, what else is white?

Dad – Your kids?

Time to go home, speech therapy over for the day.