Every rare now and then I wonder what my late father would have said or thought about my autism diagnosis, which didn’t come until almost a decade after he was gone. I don’t think it would have been like the psychological pummeling I took overnight from the dream in which he sprung a major surprise on me, I complained that he can’t do that to me because I need advance notice in order to adjust, he angrily said I really needed help with this autism thing, and I said maybe the help I needed was for people to just listen to me when I explain how to help. But who knows. Either way, I woke this morning feeling pretty roundly defeated.