By Dr. Bruce Mills, Vice President of the Board of Directors for The Gray Center

With my four-year-old son, Jacob, I enter the front doors of Croyden Avenue School and move toward the steps that descend to the classroom for children with autism.  He lingers at the top of the stairs and, as most days, picks up the receiver from the pay phone and awkwardly tucks it between his cheek and shoulder.  The ritual is not new so I wait, calling his name once or twice out of habit, before slipping the phone from his grasp and directing him down the steps to his room.  In these moments when Jacob drifts outside the hurried current of the morning, I sometimes enter my own memories of grade school. The sound of stiff new jeans scissoring down the halls calls forth other sensual details of my youth: the sharp cries across a playground, the art room odor of crayon, the touch of white paste and papier-mâché, the brilliant reds and purples of thick-textured paintings dried and cracking like late summer creek beds.

I remember walking down to the playground of my northwest Iowa elementary school, Arctic Cat snowmobile boots tossing fragments of snow from my heels, blackened mittens on my hands, a basketball tucked under my right arm.  Alone, I launched shot after shot at a hoop positioned on the end of the asphalt surface in front of the school.  Before long, the ball grew slick and harder to balance on the wide mitts.  But, in my imagination, I was always a point behind and poised for the miraculous last shot, for some sign that divinity still intervened for those who held out in the cold.  When it was near zero or below, I wore a ski mask.  On those frigid dusks of mid-winter, the moisture from my breath would dampen the thin cloth, and the cotton would freeze and harden.  Once, when the mask rubbed awkwardly against my cheeks, I pulled it from my face and gave life back to the vacant expression by blowing my hot breath through the thin frozen layers.  When it grew dark not long after five, I would slowly walk over to the west side of the building, position my forearms on the brick ledge of the window casement, kick my feet against the wall, and balance precariously to see the time on the clock above the cursive alphabet.

I find it odd to have such intimate knowledge of this child who has no memory of me.  Pushing himself back from the wall of the school, he bends to embrace the ball and tightly shuts his eyes to melt the ice that has laced together his long lashes.  His measured strides across the small, snow-covered baseball field are occasionally interrupted by the syncopation of a sudden slide over a patch of ice or a spontaneous skip and rising puff of kicked snow.  Around him, the wind has risen slightly, and the streetlight catches the crystals of scattering snowflakes before they disappear into the shadows.  I follow their scattering into the dark.  When I look up, the boy has vanished, and I feel my feet on the dry ground of such an unfamiliar place, my hands upon the shoulders of a son whose vacant stare seems blind and so unmindful of me.

            Later that afternoon, I wait on a bench outside the front office at Croyden.  Jacob climbs the stairs; his hand glides up the rail.  He is strange.  He wears his backpack unlike other children who know how other children wear their backpacks.  He backs into my embrace.  As I kneel before him, I gently turn his shoulders until his face is before mine, until I can feel the faint touch of his breath against my lips.  "Jacob, what do you say?"  He does not raise his chin.  "Look at Daddy, Jacob."  He lifts his head, but our eyes are like repelling magnets.  I raise my hand and hold his chin.  He is still learning to see me, to acknowledge my gaze.  When he finally fixes his eyes momentarily on mine, it is hard to know whether he apprehends me in a way that I understand.  It is daydreamer's glance, a glimpse of some reverie initiated by my voice.  I seem to exist as a memory, not flesh and bone.

            "Hi, Daddy."  His voice is nourishment, a food that fills me.

Driving home, I ask him if he had a good day.  He disregards my question and begins the motif that will become the ritualistic chant of the afternoon.

            "Watch TV."

            "First lunch and then TV."

            "Watch TV.  Oh, yea, watch TV."  The "Oh, yea" is from TV.

            "First we eat lunch, then TV." I reply calmly.

            "Haveta gonna draw!  Haveta gonna draw!"

            "Would you like to draw when we get home, Jacob?"  No one but me enjoys the irony.

            "Haveta gonna draw!"

            "When we get home."

            When we get home, I draw.  I start to sketch in pencil the small Mickey Mouse logo from his Beauty and the Beast video box.  He watches the ritual acutely; it is always new.  He is wary lest I should color the yellow shoes red or the blue hat black.  Erase it, he says, when I begin the third Mickey.  I have learned to draw gently so that my erasing will not leave marks.

            "This one," Jacob says, pointing to the Walt Disney Productions lettering.  I loop the large "W" and "D" with practiced flourish as my son chants one of the Disney musical motifs.  Then he sees something wrong, something that I do not notice.  It has to do with the "t" in "Walt."

            "This one."

            I hear urgency in his voice.  I look closely at the letter.  I amend.

            "This one," he insists.  He traces the letter on the table as if I can see on the plastic tablecloth the vivid design in his mind.  I watch his fingers; in my palm, his hand would disappear, it seems so small.

            "Show me," I say, handing him the pencil.  On most days, he refuses.  Today, he takes it.  He presses hard on the lead and the cross in the "t" slides toward the "D" like a train wreck.

"Oh no, look what you dee-id!"  Jacob laments, mixing pronouns and using a phrase and intonation gathered from a Curious George video.  Or is it I who he sees as the curious little monkey, creating a mess of things again?

I pick up the pencil and try again and again.  Finally, among the scattered drawings that litter the table, I succumb to the frustration, to the seeming emptiness of these unthinking patterns.  I toss the pencil down and say "this one" is my "t", that it is the way I will draw the "t", and that Jacob should draw his own "t."

            "Draw it!" he replies.

            "No, you do it!"

            "Daddy do it!"

            "No, Jacob do it!"

            Suddenly, the papers take to the air, and Jacob runs screaming into the living room.  More colors than I can name spread through the room: red and blue and green Duplos clack against the sides of the couch and picture window, the yellow of the box glances off my arm, and the glare of sunlight catches them all, a prism undone.  His words break against me, "Want to try again!  Want to try again!"  In these moments, Jacob will suddenly look directly at me and find the pronouns and names that have fallen off the edges of his sentences.  "I want to try again, please Daddy."  And I wonder what memory held the syntax of this pleading.

            At the end of the week, I again arrive shortly after mid-day to pick up Jacob from Croyden.  I sit upon the bench along a wall in the front lobby and lean back against the red brick.  Children are arriving for the afternoon.  I hear the whir of the elevator of the first bus.  From its side emerges a young girl in a wheel chair.  Her head tilts against the sparkling plastic head cushion, a hint of drool begins to collect in the right corner of her mouth.  Her smile unsettles me.  She is glancing somewhere where I am not, but I sit up, eager to greet her at the door.  I am learning to look into her eyes.

            Outside a few flakes of snow begin to suggest themselves, lingering like the descending ash of the burnings of late fall.  As I try to make out the snow from the gray sky, another memory urges itself forward.  I am twelve and on my stingray bicycle pedaling through an empty street to a 6:30 a.m. basketball practice.  It is middle December.  A night snow has covered the street with a blanket of white; except for the shadows cast by the intervals of streetlights and the predictable angles of houses and sidewalks, the landscape has few boundaries.  For a moment, I close my eyes and ride blind, until, feeling the thrill of pedaling just beyond some imaginary limit, I stop to look over my shoulder.  Behind me, the wandering indentations of my tires, like the frozen paths of small streams, fill with snow, the more distant banks diminished to thin creases of shadow.  The street stretches forth like a flood plain fertile with the meanderings of past river channels.  It is world that I had not seen, and so I let myself linger in the space between past and present, this borderless landscape of beauty and loss.

More buses and cars move up to the curb.  A few parents enter with their sons or daughters.  One child catches my eye; he seems older than the others.  After the boy leaves to go down the stairs to his classroom, his mother takes a seat on the other end of my bench.  When our eyes meet, I introduce myself and am about to tell her about Jacob just as she is called into the office to talk with the school psychologist.  She hesitates a moment, and I sense that she does not want to do the unkindness of not hearing about my son.  But I glance toward the office to divert her eyes and assure her.  "Perhaps another time," I say.

After she goes, I can feel the vibrations of my son's unuttered name on my tongue and the way my lungs had filled to hold the beginnings of an unformed tale.  For a moment, I see myself through her eyes--an eager father whose son now plays in a place previously unimagined and who pauses on the threshold between a world just opening up and another seemingly canceled out.  I glimpse with sadness the distinct outlines of that person that Jacob has begun to erase.  At first, he remains distant, but I coax the ghost forward with my yearning.  Wordlessly, he lifts his head as if in a daydream and meets my gaze.  If we can hold another's eyes for just a moment, I wonder, perhaps that is enough.  And then I think back to the woman's eyes and the healing pause of a hesitant recognition, a shared longing, a hunger for the retelling or a new telling of a story she well knew.  It is what we both needed, this amending, this wash of words.

Jacob has had a rough morning, his aide says.  He had to have some quiet time because he would not join snack group.  During recess, he stood at the top of the Purple Mountain, a favorite climbing toy, and danced on one leg.  Even now Jacob is dancing and laughing and saying "Lucky get down!  Lucky get down!"  Around me I can feel the movement of other children exiting and entering through the sliding glass door.

            We walk outside and before I can stop him he races to the slide at the back of the building, the wind blowing back the hood of his fall jacket.  I run after him.  He refuses to come with me until I bribe him with getting french fries at McDonald's.  It takes fifteen more minutes to get to the car.  My ears are numb from the cold air; my palms still feel the steel handles of the slide.

            Once home, we draw.  I search for unmarked paper in the piles of half-done drawings atop the refrigerator and kitchen counter.  We have run through the ream of blank paper, so I gather four pieces that promise the easiest erasing and carefully remove half-written words and the limbs of cartoon characters.

            "Haveta gonna draw Walt Disney Productions," Jacob commands.

            I take up the pencil, bracing myself for the fight I see coming.  When I get to the "t", Jacob moves off his chair and, clutching the video box, crowds in upon my lap.

            "This one.  This one."  His voice is calm, and I am surprised by how the words seem empty of memory, how the phrases merge together quiet, encouraging, and full of trust.

            As I am about to retrace the lines from our previous play, I see something that I had not seen before.  Just above the small curve of his pointing finger, barely showing through the dark background behind the lettering, a small loop appears where I thought I had seen a straight cross line.  It was never a straight line.  It was always a small but clearly discernible loop.  With this revelation, I see the smaller letters of the words anew: the way the crossing middle of the "a" touches, but barely touches the initial "W" in "Walt," the way the "s" in "Disney" keeps curling, how the final "y" reflects the hurry of the last letter of any signature.  I let the pencil rest for a moment and smell the back of my son's head.  I press my lips against his cheek until he lifts his shoulder, leans away, and says, "Haveta gonna draw the 't.'"

Slowly, gently, I press the lead to the page.  After I finish, Jacob holds the paper in his hand and, satisfied, lets it fall.  It slices the air and then rises for just a moment, suspended, as if hesitating playfully before a final slide to the floor.

            When I was young, I would frequently stare out the north window of my house.  Beyond the railroad tracks just twenty feet from our garage and not far from the highway running parallel to the tracks spread the flat expanse of a field.  I was five and struck with awe at that endless stretch of furrows stitched so seamlessly to the distant horizon, and I stumbled into the question of beginnings.  What started all this?  What came before the feel of the field upon my eyes, before the dirt itself, before the pulling back of ice and snow?  At times, it seems as if I began living that day.  The spirit demands the expansiveness of such imaginings.

            We walk on vast flood plains.  Beneath our feet, the firmness of the ground seems to confirm the permanence of the river channel.  To hold up the banks, we press rocks and concrete, believing that our labors can prevent the slide of soil.  But there is no telling what may happen when the snow thaws or the next rain comes.  The bend in the distance may straighten and, suddenly, the landscape is no longer recognizable.

            Living with Jacob is about more than allowing the language of his mind erase the chalk lines of my own patterns.  It is about unexpected intersections, the willingness to walk blind, to discern shadows in the lay of the land.   It is a replenishing grief.