Mostly.

With about three hours left in our two-day trip home from North Carolina, Kari gave Christopher his regular medication in the form of a small chewable tablet.

Heaven knows why, maybe it was just a little bit too quiet in the back seat, but a minute or tow later it occurred to Kari to ask, "Christopher, have you taken your pill yet?"

"No," was the sheepish reply.

Now, Christopher is generally good about taking his meds, so Kari's rejoinder was somewhat incredulous: "Well?! Where is your pill?"

"In my nose."

"What??!!"

"Right here," he said, pointing to a place between his eyes.

I immediately pulled the car over into a small church parking lot, got out, circled around to Christopher's side of the car, opened the back door, and, peering up Christopher's nostril, called out to Kari like a surgeon to a nurse, "Tweezers!"

Kari, already on top of the situation, smacked the tweezers into the palm of my hand and the next thirty seconds or so were tense as I tried to extricate the slippery white tablet without shoving it deeper in. Finally, I resorted to what should have been Plan A in the first place and called to Kari, "Kleenex!"

Three blows and out it popped. Kari and I were nearly in unison: "Now pick it up and eat it!"

Ten seconds later we were back on the road, a minimal impact on the trip's overall miles-per-hour average.

Ben: On Saturday, can we go around the neighborhood and sell the paper airplanes I made? I could sell them for a dollar each!

Ken: Well, you need to know your market, right? Do you think people will want to spend a whole dollar on a paper airplane?

Ben: Why not?

Ken: You need to sell things people want. Like in the summer, kids sell lemonade because it's hot and people are thirsty, right?

Christopher (exuberant): And it's yummy!!

Ben: So, maybe...maybe we could sell...hats.

Ken: Sure! It's cold, right? And people want to keep their ears warm, right?

Christopher (silly): And it's yummy!

Ben: Yeah, Mommy could make the hats and I'll be the manager! And you guys can be my...workers!

Ken (dubious): Yeah....

Christopher: And what will I do?

Ben: You can draw the pictures, and Mommy will use the pictures to know how to make the hats.

Ken: So, you've got design, and production, and management. What else do you need?

Ben: And you can tell people to buy the hats!

Christopher: Me too!

Ken: So...now you've got sales. What about HR or Accounting?

Ben: What?

Ken: Well, you need someone to keep track of all the money you will be making and so you can pay your workers...

Ben: Right, I'll give some money to the workers and the rest I'll use to buy toys!

Ken: Right. That's called spending the profits.

In other news, we've begun teaching Christopher braille. Why braille, you ask, when he (to all outward appearances at least) is coping just fine using his (limited) vision? Well, after discussing it, Kari & I agreed that we have to be prepared for the chance that his vision will deteriorate. Might as well start training Christopher now while his brain is still so spongelike (see how quickly he picked up English!).

Another, and perhaps an even bigger, factor in the decision is that once he is actively reading and interacting in our text-rich world, he is going to need as many different kinds of inputs as he can get. Even though there are all kinds of magnifiers, large-print books, and assistive computer interfaces for those with low vision, we've learned that it is mentally and physically exhausting to have to interact with text at a large size. Imagine what it would be like to have to read a book or a newspaper article when you can only take in two or three words at a time.

On the other hand, maybe that is the kind of thing Christopher can adapt to. This video is literally the third time Christopher has interacted with a computer. Of course, it's easy to maintain a certain level of stamina when you keep shoving grapes into your mouth.

Ben and Christopher have both been crazy for Playmobile toys ever since we bought a big airplane for Ben for his sixth birthday. And, of course, it's no secret that Ben is crazy about Audrey as well. Unfortunately, the only pictures we got of the trip came at the end as we were trying to wrangle the kids together for a group photo. It's clear that Ben and Audrey were struggling with the impending departure.

I first started reading DFW's work in the mid-nineties. It was odd, bizarre even, how his writing resonated with me. Sitting there, I felt as though he had unscrewed the top of my skull and connected electrodes to my brain to channel his words directly into my head. Knowing that this voice has been silenced forever, my emotions over the past couple of days have run the entire circuit with pit-stops at shock, sorrow, anger, confusion, and regret. The regret is because I never took that extra step of reaching out to him, even just to send a postcard of thanks telling him how much his work meant to me.

I don't even want to speculate on the demons that drove Wallace to his desperate end. Mostly, my heart goes out to his wife, his parents and sister, and all those who were close to him. I can scarcely imagine their loss and wish for them a solace that I know is not likely to come soon.

For the rest of us, there has been an explosion of memorials, remembrances, and tributes to David Foster Wallace. The Howling Fantods site has been compiling a list of them. The ones that I have appreciated most are those written by people who actually had some, no matter how fleeting, personal contact with Wallace. It's confirmation that the actual man was kind and thoughtful and generous, exceeding even my lofty fanboy expectations:
Kathleen Fitzpatrick

McSweeney's has devoted the front page of its website to remembrances of DFW for the “forseeable future”. Here is Zadie Smith's contribution:

He was my favourite. I didn't feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let's at least only say true things.¹ The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It's what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. The only exception was the math one, which I was too stupid to understand. One day, soon after it was published, David phoned up, sincerely apologetic, and said: "No, look ... you don't need anything more than high school math, that's all I really have." He was very funny. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was my favourite, my literary hero, I loved him and I'll always miss him.

1 - And let's say them grammatically.

If you're unfamiliar with Wallace's writing, the pieces he's written for Harper's would be a good place to start. Also: this Kenyon College commencement address provides a blueprint for living in the world today honestly and generously without compromise:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

And so I'm mostly past all those other emotions at this point and am currently at gratitude: gratitude that a man such as David Foster Wallace lived and breathed and left behind a body of work that was able, somehow, through all the background noise, to touch the lives of others in such a positive way. Also, hope: hope that those he touched will continue to find meaning and goodness in his work and that they, we, all of us, might have the courage to further his legacy.

We knew pretty much right away what we were getting ourselves into, of course. And we wouldn't trade a single minute.

So we ordered some delicious Thai/Vietnamese takeout tonight as part of a small celebration (more about that to come). At first, I thought that it was nice of the restaurant to provide the friendly, happy “Have a Nice Day” bags, but then after looking a little closer, we're not sure they actually meant it. As Kari said, “It's just not very convincing, is it?”

Behold the before-and-after glory of the Chicken Inferno, 10th edition. Even better, check out this cool time-lapse video.