How Did This Get There?
November 23, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
The CNN special on autism, Autism: Finding Amanda, will NOT be airing tonight due to liveprogramming on Larry King. Parts of the segment can be seen on this site, and discussion about autism, adults with autism, and the show here.
How did the turkey DNA get in the dinosaur bone? Eye on DNA has a (possible) answer by way of an interview with Dr. Jonathan Wells: Maybe someone dropped a turkey sandwich at a dig? All I can say is, that question of “how did this [turkey DNA] get here [on the dinosaur bone]?” recalls a question I frequently ask myself when I find a certain shirt of mine that has been missing tucked neatly in the space between the wall and Charlie’s mattress, or when I come upon a piece of well-crumbled paper shoved in the bottom of his “blue case” (this used to be the case for my laptop; Charlie appropriated it some months ago for his iPod, headphones, very favorite photos, and picture schedule). The piece of paper was actually a permit for our town’s annual “clean out the junk from your basement” pick-up and it would have been helpful to have found it a bit earlier…..
Charlie is not, I think, trying to hide anything, but putting the things that he finds important and appealing in places of importance to him. It’s up to me to figure out his sense of how things should be ordered. (See my friend Whitterer on Autism about where she found the top of the blender, and Casdok on finding somethings everywhere except where one might wish them to be.) But Charlie does not have enough language to actually say where he puts things and, indeed, he also is not yet using the word “where” to ask such questions as “where did I put Mom’s shirt?”. So sometimes I find myself playing a double guessing game when he says “I want.” I have to figure out both what he wants and where that item might be—-have to figure out both the answers and the questions. And then sometimes—as with that shirt of mine—I ask “where” and “where is it” and Charlie’s echolalic response (me: “Where is it?” Charlie: “Where sitt?”) seems as good as any.
It’s a treasure hunt (so to speak) with Charlie’s words and parts of words as clues, and, when the object is found, general joy almost as great as when a new dinosaur is discovered. Can you say “eureka”"……….
luckily my little hoarder puts everything under thing that he can *just* barely fit under… the quilt rack, his bed, the baker’s rack, and sometime the old chifarobe (sp?) in my bedroom. I find clothes, food (apples, pretzels, chew up stuff), candles, and lots of his “trinkets.” I was going to say I’m lucky that I know where to look, but sometimes, it’s not so lucky!
We have this situation as well. If Maizie puts something somewhere chances are we may not find it for days!
Oh I know what you mean. Mine used to hide things in the same place [which was great!] now he’s more inventive and trying to get inside his head and unravel things is more difficult than the average crossword puzzle.
Cheers
Then there were the photos (favorite ones) Charlie put into the crack at the top of the stairs!
The house my family lived in when I was between the ages of 3 and 8 had a rather large (at least 12″ x 12″) hole in one of the bedroom closets. I remember very deliberately dropping various items into the hole (including a Kermit the Frog watch I never found again) and generally being fascinated by it.
I also remember lying on the living room floor dropping papers, cards, and other small objects through the heat registers. And I’ve always tended to carry a backpack around with various familiar/useful things in it.
There is definitely something about “putting things in places” (sometimes for storage, sometimes in a sort of “investigative” sense — my putting things down the heat register vents felt vaguely like the scenes I saw in cartoons where people would throw pebbles into wells to see if they could “hear” where the water was.)