Happy Birthday Alfred! Wish You Were Here!

I wish he was here to celebrate his 44th birthday, but tragically he can't.  Back on June 15, 1980 (Father's Day) he was driving his Camero home from church in the middle of the day when he somehow lost control of his blue Camero and struck a big tree head-on.  He suffered a head injury and a broken leg.  The crash was in Rock Creek Park near Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC.  He was helicoptered to the hospital.  Our parents got the call from the hospital and went there to see him while I was miles away on a school field trip to the beach at Assateague Island in Maryland.  I didn't know about Alfred's situation until the school bus got back in town late that Sunday night.  My father broke the bad news to me as he drove me back home.

The next day I saw Alfred at the hospital all hooked up to machines that were helping him breathe.  It was a hearbreaking sight.  He was brain dead a few days later on June 19.  He was only a few weeks away from his 19th birthday.

I rather talk about his life than his death.  He had an abundance of social skills.  He easily made friends with everyone he came in contact with.  On the other hand, I had the hardest time making friends with anyone.  Alfred would just simply talk to them and - Viola! - instant friends.  With me, it was instant World War III whenever I talked to someone either at school or anywhere else.  This drove me crazy because I thought everyone was just being unfair to me and were treating Alfred like he was Elvis Presley or one of the Beatles.  No one hated him.  In fact, on his tombstone it says "To know him is to love him."

His death happened while I was still in high school, a place where his fellows students treated him extremely well.  I had just finished 10th grade the week he died.  Even more depressing that we knew the night before on June 18, Paul McCartney's birthday, that Alfred wasn't going to make it.  Paul is my favorite Beatle, but I love all four Beatles.  You don't have to imagine (no pun intended) how I felt when Daddy told me that John Lennon had been shot and killed in New York City almost six months after Alfred died.

Alfred was and still is in my thoughts.  In the years after his death, I had tried very hard to improve my social skills and kept on failing every time.  Just before my 30th birthday when I was ending a disasterous relationship, I realized that something in my brain was preventing me from socializing correctly.  Then in November 1997 I realized the first time that I couldn't see certain facial expressions and had trouble understanding body language.  It was until 2002 when I had my diagnosis of Aspeger's Syndrome and Non-Verbal Learning Disorder.  

At last The Mystery of My Missing Social Skills was solved.