There sat Greg with a cardboard ‘Birthday Boy” crown on his head, his tongue attempting to lick the orange glob of pumpkin colored birthday cake frosting at the corner of his mouth.

“Do you want another piece, Greg?” asked Chelsea, one of the caregivers in his group home.

“OK,” said Greg, whose Down syndrome effect on his speech makes that word sound like “Oohh-gay.”

Then he stopped.

“No, no,” he said.

What came out next is easily enough understood by people who have come to know Greg. For strangers, it takes a bit of parsing.

What he actually said is close to, “All done … mo-yo… Heb-a-lee …. Pat-ick-Patick!”

Parsing that into our kind of speech yields, “I am all done. Put it away so that tomorrow, there will be some left for Emily and Patrick,” two staff members who did not work on Greg’s 39th birthday last week.

It takes a fair degree of sophistication for someone who loves his food as much as Greg does to try to ensure that some of his favorite food is set aside for others.

But that is Greg.

I tell you this each year at about this time, because as Greg’s legal guardians, I and his brother Mike must file an annual report on Greg’s welfare with the county court.

But each year, I file two “annual reports.”

This article is the second of those reports.

It is addressed to you.

Everybody who reads this article pays taxes in one form or another, be they income taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, etc.

Money from those taxes goes toward supporting Greg in his group home where he lives with three other special needs guys. In earlier years, those taxes paid for his special education classes in Warren and DuBois, and for staff salaries and program costs to help Greg and people like him.

The tax money only pays part of Greg’s upkeep. Taxes pay a big part, but not all of it.

Greg pays some of his expenses – and he pays sales taxes, too. He does that through his pay for “piece work” at a sheltered workshop in Warren, just as he got paid in earlier years for working at a similar facility in DuBois.

He is so proud of being able to pay his own way just a bit. He grins as he makes the thumb-and-two-fingers rubbing sign for cash while telling us about “my money.”

You give him that pride.

Greg was born when I was 34 years old. His mother and I were jolted, hard, by the news that he had a genetic abnormality that would retard his physical and mental development. We felt very, very alone.

But we weren’t.

Even before the six long weeks it then took for genetic testing to confirm an extra piece in the 21st chromosome of every cell in his body, we had help. Some of the help was person-to-person, from people who had had family members with Down syndrome, and from family and friends. Other help came from the school district, the mental health/retardation agency – tax-supported agencies.

You pay those taxes.

I had an older cousin with Down syndrome. For most of his life, Richard was locked away, in an attic bedroom with few trips outside, no schooling, no church and no friends. Later, he was institutionalized. Only in his last years, when changed attitudes and better programs permitted, did he get to live for a while in a community. He liked that, but the decades of isolation had left him stunted socially as well as intellectually. He endured, but he did not have the support to develop as fully as he might have done.

Happily, that has not been Greg’s life. He has been in school, in church, in Special Olympics, in work programs. He is now living in “my own house,” proud to be self-sufficient in basic care even though supervision is needed.

You underwrote that, with your taxes.

You underscored that, with your patience when it took forever to get Greg up a set of stairs once he got to needing a walker; with your smiles when he acted goofy, which, yes, he sometimes does; with your, “Hi, Greg!” at the barbershop or the restaurant.

So again this year, I am filing this report to tell you that those tax dollars have been well spent.

We can measure the greatness of our society by the ways in which we free the abilities of our best and brightest.

We measure the nobility of our society by the ways in which we accept, and lift up, those to whom much less has been given.

You have been noble to my son. In return, you get this nearly 40-year-old with the wide grin and zest for life that brightens days for all of us.

Again, thank you.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.