Another man's path

The problem with blogs is that they read as a story told backward.  I am better at telling a story from the beginning.  At this point though my writing are fairly random so I suppose it ceases to matter. 

Not very long ago I took my children to our local schoolyard to play after supper.  There was a man there with his 2 children and a metal detector.  His children were friendly and we ended up talking.  He had an interesting story.

I talked about dyslexia, what it was (since he didn't seem to know), what it meant to our family and how my older child is now getting along fine thanks to the school where my brother once went and the Orton Gillingham system. 

He told me he worked for a company that moves offices but the work was sporadic. He said based on his work he felt the economy still wasn't doing very well.

His wife worked at Target where although she had been a valuable employee for many years there was never going to be any promotion for her (they had finally figured this out he said). 

He had been moved from a very rural area into the big city at a young age when his mother found a man to run off with.  Previously he had lived with her and his grandparents deep in the country.  He never moved back to the country and ended up dropping out of one of my city's least respected high schools. 

Although he didn't say he thought he had dyslexia he was so interested in my story I sensed that something was familiar to him. Later he told me that he couldn't read,  that he never could and that he was pleased that both his children were able to read.  He said his oldest especially was doing well in school and that he couldn't have been more proud.  I was glad for him.

As I said before, he reminded me of my brother, he looked like him and they were roughly the same age. My brother's children do not have dyslexia either.

I went home and called my brother with dyslexia, and we talked about the huge financial sacrifice that my parents made so many years ago so that he might go to the school where my daughter goes now.  That school at the time was the same price as going to college and my parents went to the bank and took out a loan for it that took them many years to pay off.  He stayed there for 3 years and after that time (5th-7th grade) he could read and had some semblance of a self esteem again. 

This man made me realize again how important of a decision my parents made.