“Happy Birthday to Charlie”

It is not Charlie’s birthday—he went to a birthday party yesterday, and has still been singing the song. He first learned to sing the song with his own name in the third verse, and it has not proved easy for him to switch to different names (”Sweet M”; “Grandpa,” etc.). I suppose in the days when autism was equated with childhood schizophrenia, Charlie’s only singing “Happy Birthday to Charlie” might have been interpreted as yet another sign of how caught up in and absorbed in himself he, being autistic, was. The difficulty Charlie has switching to a different name in the song as the occasion demands strikes me as a sign of his speech delay and of his neurological wiring: Once he learns to say something (such as a song) it is not so easy to switch up the words.

Charlie’s birthday is always my favorite to celebrate, as it is.