Everything on the cover of my book, My So-Called Disorder, has significance to me and to my story. Take for instance, "pipe cleaner man." He shows up on the front cover, upper right. He shows up in the book in Chapter 36, where I talk about creatively autistic solutions I've come up with on the job. We represented a man who was crushed under the roll bar of his tractor. An earlier model of the roll bar (like the one in my pictures) would have prevented his death. We were taking the deposition of a scene witness, and I was prepared.
At a deposition of the responding EMT, the company’s attorney asked the firefighter to illustrate how our client was pinned beneath the roll-bar. When the firefighter said he wasn’t a good artist, I pulled out the tractor model. No slouch, the company attorney pulled out a wooden artist’s mannequin with moveable limbs—but the EMT struggled to recreate the scene because the mannequin was way too big for the model tractor. That’s when I revealed “Pipe-Cleaner Man,” a tiny figure I had made from pipe-cleaners and dressed in colored masking tape. I even fattened him up to the size of our client’s deceased husband. The EMT bent him into exact position beneath the tractor roll-bar and we took a photo. Pipe-Cleaner Man still gets a chuckle out of the few of us who remember.
Pipe Cleaner Man, now 25 years older, is not as limber or as colorful as he once was, but he's still a thing of beauty to me. (And his early demise would have been prevented if he had the roll bar shown on the model, designed specifically to prevent crush injuries.)
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