Just A Little Noise Music

I love the sound of Charlie’s voice. Expressing himself using the spoken word continues to be one of his biggest struggles: Charlie still has traces of apraxia and has to try hard to articulate each word and syllable. I suspect that he is overly familiar with people saying “what did he say?” after he has spoken. Charlie could not talk prior to being diagnosed with autism in July of 1999 just after he turned two years old; sign language and lots of speech therapy especially helped him to talk. Charlie used PECS when he was 3-7, but often found this frustrating: It was so much faster, he had discovered, to talk. Charlie also had a lot of difficulty learning what many PECS cards—with their line drawings and puzzling graphics—-meant. Charlie, I think, likes to talk and certainly knows how to get the most mileage out of a few words: “No,” “yes,” and “give” all have multiple meanings in Charlie’s vocabulary. (”Give,” for instance, can mean here, take it, I don’t want this, here you go, etc.)

Jim and I have always savored each word Charlie says. Talk is never cheap when the words come from Charlie and our household tends to be noisy and full of (not always verbal) chatter, above and beyond the noise and chatter generated by any household with an active, loves-to-be-outside running here and there, growing boy.

So I think you’ll understand why I paused a bit as a couple of our new neighbors introduced themselves as we moved in: Everyone who lives in the condo units where we are renting seems to be near or at retirement age. “There’s no kids around here, just some of us have grandchildren,” said one woman to me as I unloaded clothes and boxes, and thought about how much Charlie loves to run up and down the hallway and land with a glorious splat and lots of laughing and kicking on his bed. (His love of jumping on his bed caused him to break the bed frame, as Jim discovered when he disassembed it this morning to put it in the U-Haul van.)

I do hope the neighbors can get to know Charlie as Charlie………Nonetheless, I think we’ll be shopping for a throw rug this weekend.