Plenty Good English
May 30, 2009 by Jeff Stimpson
Filed under Health
I like to think Alex is a little more normal — or, like everyone else, manipulative — than might first meet the eye. Most obviously, there are the exchanges that go like this:
“Crackers?”
“How about pretzels, Alex?”
“How about crackers?”
or
“Alex, we can buy one book today. One book.”
“Buy two books?”
Image (Paul Klee's "One Who Understands"): Ben Sullivan, Flickr.com
That’s just wheeling dealing; that’s just how everyone gets through the world, and it’ll be great to see develop, just like it would be in a “normal” kid, until it inconveniences me. I know he understands stuff, too, but just doesn’t let on he knows. Like it takes dynamite to wake him at 6 a.m. on a school morning, yet he pops up like a dawn sparrow on weekends. I used to think this was just autism making my life a twisted mess until it occured to me that somebody at Alex’s school must say to him “Have a good weekend — see you Monday!” on Friday afternoon. So he knows it’s Funday the next day, and he’s happy and eager to bounce up at a Marine Corps hour, just like any kid would be. It’s just that any kid might also tell you so.
But sometimes it does feel like yes, you’re driving in traffic with Alex, but instead of red, yellow and green, the streetlights are blue, pink, and brown.
Consider the street-crossing scene in Rain Man, where Raymond stops mid-way through the street because the walk signal changes from Walk to a blinking Don’t Walk. “No, Raymond/Alex,” I feel I could explain, “you cross when it says Walk and you can still cross when it says Don’t Walk but it’s blinking. You have to stop when it says Don’t Walk and it’s no longer blinking.”
“No longer blinking,” I’m sure Alex would say. You and I would reply “okay” to these instructions. Alex, I think, would repeat one or two key phrases from the instructions. I also think that soon he’d continue walking on the blinking Don’t Walk. From his perspective, the result would be the same. From my perspective, I wouldn’t be immediately sure — “no longer blinking” isn’t “okay” to my brain — that Alex understood.
That doesn’t mean Alex wouldn’t or doesn’t understand the world. It means I still don’t understand his.
