Parallel Play Quotes

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger's

“friends and I used to play an invented parlor game called the Worst Records Never Made. The point was to hypothesize the most stunningly inappropriate albums we could imagine—pairings of artists and material so horrific that even the famously dunderheaded major labels would hardly consider making them. Most of our inspirations have been lost to memory, but the notion of discs like “Yodel with the Berlin Philharmonic,” “The Three Tenors Sing Gilbert and Sullivan,” and—my favorite—“The Chipmunks Present Your Favorite Spirituals” can still inspire what P. G. Wodehouse used to call “the raised eyebrow,”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“Another doctor suggested a new anti-anxiety medication, which I duly added to the clutter of bottles by my bedside. And then, after a series of family consultations, a New York psychologist named Keith Westerfield surprised me first with a thoughtful explanation and then with a formal diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. I bought a book of essays on the condition, edited by Ami Klin, Fred R. Volkmar, and Sara S. Sparrow, and devoured it with stunned fascination. Despite the daunting medical language of some of the chapters, I felt as though I had stumbled upon my secret biography. Here it all was—the computer-like retention, the physical awkwardness, the difficulties with peers and lovers, the need for routine and repetition, the narrow, specialized interests (one article even mentioned silent film, old recordings, and true crime—had they created a developmental disorder just for me?). I was forty-five years old when I learned that I wasn’t alone.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“It has been my extraordinary good fortune to find work that makes use of my strengths and doesn’t test my weaknesses. To this day, if you put me behind a busy sales counter, a meltdown would be imminent, for I can’t easily read new faces and shifting attention rapidly from one unfamiliar person to another overwhelms me. If I could choose to have one supernatural power, it would undoubtedly be invisibility, and yet I want and need public acknowledgment of my work. I suffer little stage fright when it comes to public speaking or appearances on radio or television—I’ve got those particular acts figured out—but unstructured participation in social gatherings remains agonizing, unless I know exactly what is expected from me. It would be easier for me to improvise an epic poem before a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden than to approach an attractive stranger across the room and strike up a conversation.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“Mondays through Thursdays, students and musicians had Tanglewood pretty much to themselves. Not so on the weekends, when concert-hungry trekkers from New York, Boston, and every place in between would descend on us.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“After Caracas I no longer had a piano teacher, but I played for several hours every day and became pretty good; the first sonata by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera was a favorite, for it looks and sounds much harder than it is and is so dissonant that only a trained listener is able to discern any mistakes.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“Most of the music teachers were less pleased, as I regularly corrected their factual errors while still managing to flunk their general exams.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“It was possible to take unintended amusement from a long-standing advertisement in the Daily Journal, the city’s English-language newspaper, which boasted that a venerable hotel was located “a stone’s throw from the American embassy.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“(To this day, while I admire poetic opacity in certain authors and filmmakers, I cannot tolerate it in my own work. You may or may not like something I’ve written, but I’ll do my damnedest to ensure that you know what I wanted to say.)”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“We had gone back to San Diego for her last months, and I slept with Gaga while my mother spent most of her time over at the hospital. Early each morning, as the planes started up their infernal diving, the phone would ring and a conversation ensue, after which I would ask if my other grandmother was still living. The question grew to be reflexive and almost meaningless, just part of the daily routine, until the Sunday that Gaga shocked me by shaking her head, putting down the phone, and breaking into tears.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“His answer was to read to me—in a deep, richly cadenced voice that gave me my first glimmering that words could be as eloquent as music—but it was all poetry of loss and mourning: “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” A Shropshire Lad, and T. S. Eliot. One line from “East Coker” was especially worrisome:”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play

“My memories begin in a fragrant California backyard, when I was two years old. The yard remains, infinitely smaller than it once seemed but still heady with eucalyptus oil and sudden gusts of ocean air, just as it was in 1956.”
― Tim Page, Parallel Play