My daughter Jennifer (Jen-Friend) has autism.  Jenny McCarthy's recent comment about how you do not cure autism, but you can recover, is very true.  Jen-Friend has come very far with the constant attention and love she is given.  The primary source of attention is her mother and me.  The unending love and constant sisterly strife comes from Allison, our oldest girl.  The two bicker like old men.  Which is actually good for JF.  The discourse keeps her well away from the yawning abyss.  

According to some liberals, the same ones who would have encouraged us to abort JF since we were too old to be parents, Wal-Mart is the bastion of discount evil.  I like the store.  It is chock full of the diversity of American Life.  The good type of diversity.  Not the balkanized part.  All men are created equal and All can buy a tweleve pack of charmin for the same low price. 

 

Recently Jen-Friend was trailing me as I crossed the store from the pharmacy side toward the food side. As a reference, for those who know these stores well ( and this plays prominently in the title) we were immediately outside the large and asuredly low priced every day DVD section.)

 

A bald man with an eye-patch and in biker's leather was going from the food side toward the pharmacy end. 

 

Jennifer's eyes got big.  She looked at the cardboard cut out of Johnny Depp and squealed, "Daddy!  He's a pirate!"  She did this in the vocal range children have which sounds precisely like a secret shared with only one other person in the world, her BFF, Ivana Russky, 12 miles south of Krakow.

 

Mr Clean did not miss a beat.  He smiled at her as he bowed, and said, "Arrgh!  She is a fine lassie, and a smart one too!"  He touseled her hair and went on his way.

 

JF still looks for her pirate man every time we go to Wally World.  And some where Mr Clean will never know the joy he brought into a little world.  A joy which helps keep the gaping blackness away.