I nominated my mother to share the news of my pregnancy with the rest of our family. I was confident my father and brother wouldn’t kill the messenger, but I knew for certain they would want to kill the message.

My brother props his long legs on the dashboard of Dad’s pristine Honda. He presses his feet in their sweaty black socks into the windshield hard enough to leave `a smudge, a crime our eighty-five year-old father swoops on like a hawk.

Today is my grandmother’s 86th birthday. I met her for the first time only a few days ago. The lonely tripod that is my family in America suddenly expands and wobbles as I gain more relationships. My mother and I have travelled to a town about a hundred kilometers west of Berlin where my mother’s mother lives in a Soviet style Neubau apartment.

Born pre-Google (PG) and it is a mystery how I, not knowing I was (ASD) Autism 
Spectrum Disorder, survived fairly happy, optimistic, and somewhat whole. All 
those years, the feeling of being an alien enshrouded me, yet I wouldn't give up
trying to fit in. Didn't know anything about it but in the 1980s, when my son was 
diagnosed and then I was, well, I just did what I always did: slipped into denial 
mode.

I load up my motorcycle on a foggy morning and wind my way through the Sierras and out of California. I cut across Nevada then ride along the Arizona-Utah border. After days passing throughsage bush valleys, sandy deserts, and arid foothills, I rode over the Continental Divide this morning, my fifth day on the road. I arrive at a diner in Saguache, Colorado, a small historic mining town in the San Luis Valley.