“One of the exceptional gifts of Asperger’s Syndrome is the ability to perceive an issue from a unique perspective, which can lead to fresh or surprising solutions.” – from Stepping Stones: our pathfinding adventure with Asperger’s.
Despite some very rough times growing up, when our son’s autism spectrum disorder (ASD) hindered his social development, that same gift later enabled his success as a research engineer with a Master’s in physics.
Stepping Stones is the story of the paths we carved while raising a child on the high functioning sliver of the autism spectrum. We offer it as a trail guide of hope for all parents and caregivers of children with ASD.
We are offering a free ebook copy (pdf or epub) to all who leave a message of “book” with an email address. (See contact page.) All we ask is that you provide an honest review on Amazon when finished reading it. We wish all the best in their daily challenges!
The image shown comes from the book’s back cover. It was created by our son by plotting the solutions of millions of polynomial equations on the complex plane, and stacking and colorizing the result.
I have now lived just as long as Leonardo Da Vinci, and longer than Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, Martin Luther King Jr, Jim Henson, C.S. Lewis, and so many other accomplished men and women I admire—and I can’t help comparing what I’ve done with my life to date.
But that’s not what I should be measuring, is it? I may not have produced a similar depth and breadth of accomplishments, but…
Have I nurtured my own gifts and talents?
Have I well-stewarded the resources I’ve been accountable for?
Have I contributed my best to my tasks, responsibilities, goals, and dreams?
Is my conscience clean, despite my failures, mistakes and shortcomings?
Have I extended grace to those who have disappointed or wronged me?
Have I been a positive influence to those who know me?
Have I loved my family to the utmost, and lived my life with integrity?
If so, I’m ok with that.
And any comparisons with others’ accomplishments are useless.
The most impactful book to me in 2023 was one I wrote with my wife Carol and our youngest son. Stepping Stones: our pathfinding adventures with Asperger’s is our growth journey from accepting “that’s just Philip,” to obtaining a diagnosis on the autism spectrum, to learning how to cope and still succeed. From the distinct advantage of countless wayfinding steps more than 20 years in the making, we offer pragmatic guidance, self-help encouragement, and real reason for hope to all parents and caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder. tinyurl.com/4c6bxw4s
I try to read widely, for both intellectual development and entertainment. Not all my choices pertain directly to my work, or even my personal interests. Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, recommended to me by my physicist son, wasn’t one I’d have chosen on my own, but it did augment what I learned from the Oppenheimer film this year. Even fiction, when it represents a divergent point of view, can add to my useful stores of knowledge. Ilana’s Love, a book by my friend (which, despite the inference from its title is not a romance novel—a genre I usually do ignore!), furnished a thought-provoking perspective on relationships.
I re-read all 4,100 pages of the 7-volume Harry Potter series, (the first published 26 years ago!) enjoying many details and nuances not found in the films. J.K. Rowling is a master of originality, dialog, character development, and plot complexities.
Is it just me, or are subtitles are getting longer all the time? But then there’s John Grisham, whose obviously successful title formula is: “The __.” Nonetheless, the subtitles do help me better remember the content afterward.
The complete list of those I’ve read last year follows, but here are my personal citations for those I’ve found most captivating, memorable, or practical in the following categories:
Work-related:Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need Biography:Leonardo da Vinci History: The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush Science:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us Nonfiction: Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home Business:Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry’s Spiritual:Experiencing God Day by Day Fiction: What Rose Forgot, and The Man Who Died Twice
Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?, Philip Yancy
Storytizing: What’s Next After Advertising? Bob Pearson
The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush, Pierre Berton
The Freedom of Self-Forgiveness: The Path to True Christian Joy, Timothy Keller
A Wild Idea: How the Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks, Brad Edmundson
Black Ice, Brad Thor
The Case For Easter: A Journalist Investigates the Evidence for the Resurrection, Lee Strobel
The Cabinet of Dr. Leng, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Seeing Red, Sandra Brown
Jerks at Work: How to Deal with People Problems and Problem People, Ken Lloyd
Born a Yankee, Grace Carstens
Missing Witness, Gordon Campbell
Ilana’s Love, Laurel West
Relic, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, Piers Paul Read
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, Nando Parrado with Vince Rause
The Book of Lies, Brad Meltzner
The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World, Ken Alder
Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
Reliquary, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
What Rose Forgot, Nevada Barr
Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry’s, Brad Edmundson
The Book of Fate, Brad Meltzner
Once Upon a Wardrobe, Patti Callahan
Becoming Mrs. Lewis, Patti Callahan
What’s Wrong With Me? A Journal of Emotional Healing in a Broken World, Royce Alan Alford
Leonardo da Vinci, Wallter Isaacson
Stepping Stones: Our pathfinding adventure with Asperger’s, Tim and Carol Herd with Philip Herd
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong
The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, Henry Beston
13½, Nevada Barr
Love Me, Garrison Keillor
Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, Alex Wellerstein
Address Unknown, Katherine Kressman Taylor
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer
The Judge’s List, John Grisham
The Troop, Nick Cutter
The Whistler, John Grisham
The Reckoning, John Grisham
What Was Rescued, Jane Bailey
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling
Molly’s Pilgrim, Barba Cohen
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling
The Bullet That Missed, Richard Osman
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
Getting Through the Tough Stuff: It’s Always Something, Charles Swindoll
Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need, Todd Henry
The Man Who Died Twice, Richard Osman
Experiencing God Day by Day, Henry Blackaby and Richard Blackaby
Alone together without other family members this New Year’s Eve for the first time since we were newlyweds in 1978, we decided to join some of the revelers at the First Night festivities in downtown State College.
Under lightly falling snow we toured the ice sculptures and visited the live reindeer pen. We thoroughly enjoyed a performance of the Altoona Brass Collective, five tales from around the world enacted by the Adam Swartz Puppets, and a fascinatingly superb concert by Revamped, a husband and wife violin duo.
We retired early to home to watch Tractor Square Dancing from the Pennsylvania Farm Show (yes, that’s a real thing!), followed by our annual viewing of It’s A Wonderful Life.
We wish everyone a wonderful life! Happy New Year!
Supportive relationships bring vitality to reality. We are very grateful to our friends and family who have stood by us during some of our most challenging times. This year, we were able to publish our story of raising our youngest son on a high functioning sliver of the autism spectrum. As the first student in the school district diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, he became the blunt instrument of change it required but didn’t know it needed.
Each phase of life can be a stepping stone to progress. From the distinct advantage of countless wayfinding steps more than 20 years in the making, we’re now able to tell the tale of our passage. But at the time, we hadn’t a clue to the route, or the fuss we would create.
Words of faith determine the journey’s end before I arrive. In October this year, we celebrated our 45th anniversary. We couldn’t have imagined most of what our lives have become, but we know Who holds our future, and that faith has both carried us through and worked out all things for our good.
Intentional steps bring opportunities that alter destinies. In February, Philip obtained a position as a Research Engineer, after the persevering quest of 7 years and 840 job applications. We helped move him to Webster, NY and unload the truck during a winter squall off Lake Ontario with -10° windchill and near-whiteout conditions!
A strong sense of purpose overrides the pain of fulfilling it. The bold statements in this post come from several of the chapter openings in Stepping Stones: our pathfinding adventure with Asperger’s. In it, we share how we hadn’t planned to be pioneers in an arduous journey—but that’s where we have found love, courage, hope, faith, learning, humor, growth, failure, trial, and triumph—everything that rounds out a life well-lived.
Only by overcoming challenges to my progress do I advance toward it. Stepping Stones is a trail guide of hope for all the parents and caregivers of children who: appear to have advantages, but somehow do not; want to be happy and fit in, but largely cannot; yearn to be treated respectfully, but usually are not.
I affirm the worth of my potential and progress toward a favorable future. Despite advances in diagnoses, therapies and other accommodations, many systemic inequities against the neurodivergent remain to be dismantled. This book introduces the concepts required to continue organizational change. And to all parents and caregivers of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, this true tale offers pragmatic guidance, self-help encouragement, and real reason for hope.
Ignorance imprisons the mind, but learning liberates the spirit. Philip wrote the last chapter of the book, recounting the life lessons he learned in grad school and in securing a full-time job. He also created the back cover artwork and others in the book. Produced by solving and plotting the results of hundreds of millions of polynomial equations, and then stacked and colorized, he’s named this type of mathematical art “polyplots.”
Sit in peace. Stand on principle. Soar with purpose. Stepping Stones is available in print or ebook through our website timandcarolherd.com, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other booksellers.
We believe in the message our little memoir contains, and we’re trying to reach as many people as possible. We are available for speaking to groups and for book signings. If you are an active Amazon customer, you can post a review, regardless of where you have purchased the book.
We offer this story of our experience to the great range of parents, caregivers, therapists, and support networks—as well as those who are on the autism spectrum themselves—as our like-missioned, kindred spirits. And we thank you for your support.
It’s been ten years since I resigned my job to keep my integrity, spent 17 months unemployed, and lost all my money.
And I still don’t regret it.
At the time, I was the chief executive to lead and administer my organization’s comprehensive operations. But a pattern of destabilizing behavior by the Board chair undermined my authority and community relations, unsettled two organizations, hindered the ability to attract and keep good associates—and ultimately severed the trust between us.
Without recounting the agonizing year-long details, I can report that my choices narrowed to two: I could defer to the Chair’s autocratic takeover and abandon my responsibilities, my conscience, and my integrity; or I could resign to keep what was truly in my control.
Because I resigned, I was not eligible for unemployment compensation. And at age 57, I discovered ageism first-hand as I applied unsuccessfully for more than 45 positions over the next 17 months, for which I was well-qualified.
It was truly a hard time.
But as I’ve learned, “Hard is ok.” Hard times are prime growth times—but only if I so choose. My attitude and my decisions remain within my exclusive control (unlike my circumstances!), and do inevitably influence my eventual outcomes.
What I confirmed is that my character is refined in crucibles, and my resilience ripens in distresses—but only when I sustain my faith in a better future.
Do I regret having to go through this? I am sorry it happened.
However, for its surpassing opportunities and eventual superior future, I am very grateful for the experience.
the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination
“Where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot?” is the question that expressed my generation’s first defining communal catastrophe experience.
November 22, 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of that tragic, history-turning assassination.
Last month my wife and I visited Dallas, Texas for a professional conference, and discovered that we were within walking distance of the site of the shooting—the infamous Dealey Plaza.
On that fateful day, the President’s motorcade through the downtown made a sharp left onto Elm Street. At a speed of 11 mph, it started a gradual descent toward a railroad overpass. The front of the Texas School Book Depository was on the President’s right, and he waved to the crowd as he passed. Dealey Plaza, an open landscaped area at the western end of downtown Dallas, stretched out to the President’s left.
Seconds later several shots resounded in rapid succession. Lee Harvey Oswald, captured a few hours later inside the Texas Theater, was taken into custody under suspicion as the sniper who fired from the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, and also for the murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit following the very public incident.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, Oswald was subjected to a series of lineups and questioning by the Dallas Homicide and Robbery Bureau. At 1:30 am the following morning, he was arraigned before the Justice of the Peace for the murder of President Kennedy. Questioning resumed several times later that day. As he was being brought to the Captain’s office for a final round of questioning the next day, Oswald was shot and killed by nightclub owner, and alleged associate of the Chicago Outfit mafia organization, Jack Ruby.
The Warren Commission, subsequently established by President Johnson, in its 888-page final report, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to assassinate the president; and that Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later.
In our visit to the historic site last month, we discovered that Dealey Plaza and the surrounding landscaping and buildings remain quite similar to how they appeared 60 years ago. The Book Depository is now the Dallas County Administration Building. Its sixth floor houses a museum, but access to the window of the one-time “sniper’s nest” is purposely blocked off by an exhibit.
On the street below, a total of three large yellow Xs mark the locations where the killer’s bullets ended their trajectories, a promising future of a popular President, and a more optimistic era for the nation itself.
The former Texas School Book Depository Building where Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy from the sixth floor right-most window.In this image, two large, overlapping Xs show the location in the street where the first two shots reached the open convertible the President was riding. The famous “Grassy Knoll” of the 1963 reports refer to the small sloping grassy area on the left.During our visit to Dallas, we took in the view of its expansive skyline from 470 feet high atop Reunion Tower. The circled area includes the Dallas County Administration Building (formerly the Book Depository), the small “grassy knoll” to its left, the street where the President was assassinated, and the triangular open space of Dealey Plaza in the foreground.
For the record: I was in second grade in November 1963, and on the way home from school, our bus driver informed us all that the President had been shot. At home, I burst into the house to break the awful news, but my parents were already following the live reports on our black-and-white television. Two days later, my mom was watching when Ruby killed Oswald on live TV. Even as a mere 7-year-old, I was captivated by the horrific drama.
the far-reaching scope of his influence and leadership
I was very pleased to attend an informal gathering with a few former coworkers yesterday to honor our former boss Bob Shay, who was recently awarded a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alliance for New Jersey Environmental Education. What follows is an excerpt from my letter of support for his award nomination.
My fond and personal affiliation with Bob reaches back 44 years. Then-Senior Naturalist Bob was instrumental in hiring me as a very green (inexperienced!) environmental educator at the Somerset County Park Commission’s Environmental Education Center, and mentoring me in such a way that has deeply influenced the arc and success of my career ever since.
In 1986, Bob was promoted to Director of Natural Resources with the responsibility of coordinating activities of three Departments until 1995: Park Rangers, Horticulture, and Natural Environmental Sciences. He then headed Land Acquisition until his retirement in 1998. He’s authored three poetry books, and is working on a fourth, with many poems based on his observations and thoughts related to the natural world.
I started my career in environmental education without the traditional educational background. I believe Bob saw more potential in me than in my preparation, and chose to invest himself in my professional development. The foundation I built under Bob’s instruction and supervision not only skilled me in behavioral objectives, environmental education techniques, and the application of scientific principles; but also in such invaluable life skills as professional ethics, interpersonal communication, advocacy and public education, and organizational and community leadership.
The top tier of leadership in any profession is achieved when a leader develops other leaders, who in turn multiply the influence to an increasingly diverse audience. In our case: to nurture environmental awareness, grow understanding of the underlying issues, and raise motivation toward actions to solve the environmental and human problems facing our modern society. This very well describes Bob’s lifetime achievement. I submit myself as just one example of his professional reproduction.
From Bob’s competent mentoring, and his professional and personal friendship, his guidance set me on a career trajectory that extended the principles I learned and practiced under Bob to hundreds of thousands of people. I brought his knowledge to my later positions and in producing the master development plans for other environmental education centers.
I incorporated Bob’s environmental education principles when I founded The Roving Nature Center, America’s first fully mobile environmental education facility—bringing the resources, equipment and staff to any indoor or outdoor site throughout the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states. Bob deserves derivative credit when The RNC was nationally recognized by the Take Pride in America Campaign for “commitment and exceptional contribution to the stewardship of America’s natural and cultural resources.”
And I do not exaggerate to affirm that Bob’s influence stuck with me even to my current statewide responsibilities as CEO of the principal professional member association for those who work in parks and recreation. I serve on a number of national-level Boards and committees, and even there, I carry forward the personal and professional skills I learned from Bob’s example.
I do not describe my accomplishments here to boast, (which were certainly achieved with the cooperative assistance of many other skillful, talented, and united colleagues), but to draw the detectable lines demonstrating the far-reaching and long-lasting scope of Bob Shay’s influence and leadership in the environmental education profession. And I know there are many others like me who have extended his impactful example far and wide.
I am a product of Bob’s professionalism and a proud conveyor of his legacy. I enthusiastically recommend his nomination for consideration for the Patricia Kane Lifetime Achievement Award.
going back in time doesn’t always match going back in mind
Yesterday Carol and I returned to the scene of our most memorable accident, when our entire family was in a horse and buggy accident at Old Bedford Village in 1989.
We were riding in an enclosed “bus wagon” pulled by Queenie, who, when she emerged from the woods into an open area, was spooked by a kite. She took off, and despite wearing blinders, ran gaping up at the sky, and never saw the building she ran into. The old buggy crumpled into the porch, and we all landed on Carol, who hurt her leg. The camera around my neck took a vicious swipe at my forehead. Before the buggy fell completely on its side, some onlookers held it up at an angle, and we were able to pass the kids out through the side window. Old Bedford Village trundled us off to the hospital for an hours-long checkup, and when we returned to the Village that evening, they quickly refunded our admission. And they followed up on our welfare for the next several weeks. See this post for the thrilling details.
Even in a historical village, a lot can change over 34 years. No one works there now who was there then, but those we told the story to were all fascinated. We learned that Queenie’s son, Prince, was their resident horse for many years, but now they have a different one. They no longer drive cows through the village, and no longer give horse and buggy rides, because they can’t afford the liability insurance.
We think we identified the building of the accident, but it too looks different from 34 years ago. Also, the site manager told us that there are several buildings that they had to tear down over the years, so maybe it doesn’t exist anymore.
Still, we enjoyed the return on an uncrowded day, visiting yesteryear’s common facilities, tools and routines. Without a horse and buggy ride.
I recently learned quite a bit about the self-taught polymath and world-renown genius Leonardo da Vinci, in an excellent biography by Walter Isaacson.
In it I discovered that Leonardo was the illegitimate firstborn son of Piero, in a long line of Florentine notaries. He lived with his birth mother and was apprenticed to the artist Verrocchio in Florence. He was a dandy dresser, favoring rose-colored robes. He was a disdaining contemporary of Michaelangelo (“He paints like a sculptor”), a friend of Nicolo Macchiavelli, and spent the better part of his life seeking patronage from provincial rulers to do the things he wanted to do. He earned a reputation for not finishing works, preferring instead to follow his interests, rather than his commissions.
As an artist, da Vinci is famous for his ability to convey lifelike motion with emotion in his subjects, and as the painter of The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa masterpieces. But his insatiable curiosity and keen observations led to many innovative concepts in art, entertainment, nature, science, geometry, architecture, urban design, engineering, hydraulics, and anatomy, to name just several.
How many other artists do you know who dissect cadavers to learn first-hand what muscles control movements in their subjects? He studied the actual mechanisms that transmit emotions into facial expressions. On one sheet of the ever-present notebooks he clipped to his robes is an anatomical sketch of a pair of lips that seem to suggest a just a hint of a mysterious smile, which resurfaced in his most famous portrait.
But what fascinates me about his anatomical studies is his intuitive leap to connect what he observed in natural stream flow with the internal biological workings of the human heart. Informed by his love of hydraulic engineering, fluid dynamics, and his fascination with swirls and eddies, he made a discovery about the aortic valve that was not fully appreciated for centuries. In 1510, he correctly concluded in that eddies in the blood in the widened section of the aorta were responsible for closing the valve it just passed through.
The common view, which was held by most heart specialists for another 450 years, was that the valve was pushed shut from above once enough blood had rushed into the aorta and began to back up. Most other valves work that way, closing when the flow begins to reverse. But in the 1960s, a team of medical researchers at Oxford used dyes and radiography methods to observe blood flows. The experiments showed that the valve required “a fluid dynamic control mechanism which positions the cusps away from the wall of the aorta, so the slightest reversed flow will close the valve.” That mechanism, they realized, was the vortex of swirling blood that Leonardo had discovered in the aorta root.
In 1991, the Carolina Heart Institute showed how closely the Oxford experiments resembled the ones Leonardo had described in his notebooks. And in 2014, another Oxford team was able to study blood flow in a living human, using magnetic resonance techniques, to prove conclusively that Leonardo was right.
Despite his ground-breaking discoveries and insightful futuristic fancies, Leonardo seemed motivated to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, rather than to be recognized as a scholar or to influence history. He largely left his trove of treatises unpublished. Over the years, and even centuries, his discoveries had to be rediscovered by others. Isaacson concludes, “The fact that he didn’t publish served to diminish his impact on the history of science. But it didn’t diminish his genius.”
I highly recommend the book: you’ll be amazed at the scope of da Vinci’s work, and perhaps, like me, inspired to be more curious and observant.
