Boys Will Be
One of the odd and elegant benefits of being a parent is that you remember what should have been insignificant details of a perfectly random day, just another calendar flip, and you remember them forever. What you wore, what you ate, what you thought about, and how you felt when the sun rose over a world that had just gotten another friend to play with.
It makes you think that maybe there is no such thing as a random day.
It sort of makes you believe, you know?
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When my son John was 4 years old, we sat outside on a summer night and stared at the stars, and he told me of another lifetime.
"I was a man once," he said matter-of-factly, "and I drove a red car. It crashed in the desert and I died and went to heaven. I liked it there but God said you needed me here, so I came." Years later he claimed not to remember this, or speculated that he got the idea from TV. I wonder.
As a baby, he wouldn't meet your eye. He'd play for hours by himself with a single toy, all the time humming or babbling. He could be impulsive to an alarming degree, fixating on one object or goal with enormous concentration. He loved to laugh and had a great one, loud and hooting. It took him longer than usual to begin to talk.
He was extremely sensitive to smells and tastes, and the way clothes felt on his body. He'd wear his shirts and sweat pants inside out to avoid the feel of the tags on his skin. One day he came into the kitchen dressed in his usual layers of clothing, all backwards, and his sister laughed. "Here comes the inside-out boy," she said.
My son is autistic. He has Asperger's Syndrome (AS), a neurological condition, a wiring thing. People with AS lack the ability to perceive nonverbal clues, to read body language and understand inflection and intonation, things most of us learn innately at a young age. Social norms are often bewildering to them. Innocent comments or loud voices can be interpreted as threats. They sometimes stand too close, say inappropriate things, and get frustrated by messages they can't receive.
They can share traits with sufferers of more severe, debilitating forms of autism: Certain repetitive movements, tics and twitches, vocal mannerisms and odd speech. AS people are fortunate, though, in that they often desire to reach out from inside their isolated shells to interact with the rest of us; they just don't know how.
...He sometimes sees himself as Data, the android from "Star Trek" who yearned to become human. I understand this, but there are times, when he senses I'm having a rough day and hugs me, ruffles my hair and tells me I'm a great dad, that I think he's the most human person I know.
I don't know what he thinks of my life, but I know he loves me. I don't know what his future holds, but I'm confident it's bright. I don't know if he was sent here from heaven by God because I needed him. I have no idea.
I think about it a lot, though.
--The Inside-Out Boy, The World According To Chuck (Xlibris, October 2004)
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7:04:34 AM 
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