Category Archives: Neilisms

The Bright Side

The Scene: Interior of a meeting room attached to a church – a Boy Scout meeting is in progress. About a dozen Scouts sit at four tables scattered throughout the room. Some parents sit at a different table off to the side. The boys are focused on the Scoutmaster, who is standing at the front of the room talking about foods that are appropriate to bring on a camping trip. He recounts an incident when one troop brought a huge bag of plain oatmeal for their only food for the entire trip. He tells how it rained that trip, and the oatmeal soaked up the rain, so the Scouts had nothing but bland, cold oatmeal to eat. The Scouts at the meeting make faces and sounds to indicate their feelings of distaste and their sympathy for the Scouts with the oatmeal. All except one. When the other Scouts quiet down, he pipes up.

Autistic teen: But it does prevent heart disease.

Empathy Vs. Logic

The Scene: Older brother is getting ready to go to his weekly Scout meeting. He is in the living room, uniform on, tying his shoes. His mother is cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. Over the din of the clanking dishes and running water, we hear the younger brother, who is wrapped up in a blanket on the couch and appears to be sick.  

Younger brother: Tonight at your Scout meeting, could you not tell anyone about what happened to me last night? I don’t want all of them to know.

Older brother, standing up: Okay. But what’s the point of being able to talk if you have to keep secrets?

One Is Enough

The Scene: Interior suburban family home. Stacks of clothing, books, stuffed animals and various other items spill out of bedroom doors into the main hallway of the home. A preteen boy is pulling things out from under his bed as his mother sorts them. She is surrounded by piles of trash, Lego pieces, books, DVDs, colored pencils, and dirty socks. It appears to be room-cleaning day. “What about this, Mom?” the son asks, crawling out from under the bed holding a long, pointed, plastic witch nose, the kind that fits on a person’s face with adhesive tabs inside of it. “Put it in the costume box,” the mother says. The son gets up and walks out of his room. Out in the hallway, he is nearly run over by his somersaulting teen brother. The younger brother probably thinks that he might be able to get out of having to go all the way to the storage closet by pawning the witch nose off on his brother.

Younger brother (sounding enticing): Hey, you want this cool nose?

Older brother (without skipping a beat): I already have a nose.

[He continues somersaulting down the hallway.]

A Casual Observation

The Scene: Interior of a suburban family home. Errant pieces of Lego are scattered across the living room floor, along with various National Geographic magazines, empty bags of microwave popcorn, and small, jingly cat toys. A mother, reading a book, sits in the middle of the sectional couch. Her slippered feet are propped up on the coffee table. She is bundled up, wearing a jacket and knit hat, indicating that the home’s furnace is not working. Her teenage son, wearing a sweatshirt and knit Chullo hat, sits on the floor, focused on building his Lego creation. The younger son comes striding into the living room wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt.  The teenage son looks up and notices his brother.

Teenage son (deadpan voice):  Your seasonal clock is out of tick.

Nuance

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Nigel:  Mom, isn’t it strange? I love pumpkin pie but I don’t like pumpkin.

So often I take for granted my understanding of all the nuances of our culture, including aspects of our spoken communication. I know when someone is making a joke or being sarcastic, I know that sometimes when I make a brief comment or ask a rhetorical question that I usually won’t get a response, and I know that most people with typical hearing only use subtitles when watching foreign films.

My son’s autistic mind usually takes nothing for granted and makes no assumptions. If he makes a statement such as “This mixes my face” while looking into a disco ball, he will repeat the statement until someone acknowledges him. He does not take for granted that I’ve heard him, that I don’t know that he is expecting a response, or that I don’t have one for him. He doesn’t understand why no one is responding to him, so he repeats himself. He doesn’t mind repeating himself five times while I am formulating a response, especially when his statement is something as, um, unusual as “My brain is the size of twenty yellow lemons,” which he said at age eight. I had no idea where that came from.

That was also the year that he discovered that DVDs were better than VHS tapes because he could choose to watch them with subtitles so that he could keep the volume low and memorize the lines while reading them onscreen. One night, when I started watching a movie (without using subtitles), he asked, “Why you didn’t want it without words?” because he couldn’t imagine how I could deprive myself of this convenience. Growing out of clothing was also a difficult concept that year. When his briefs were getting too tighty-whitey and I had to purchase new ones, I forgot that I should have prepared him. He went to get dressed the next morning and stood there in front of his chest of drawers saying, “What about the 6 underwear?” since I had bought him size 8, and his old ones had been size 6. No assumptions.

Fast forward six years, and he is starting to make little assumptions. He realizes that just because he likes pumpkin pie, it doesn’t mean that he’s going to like pumpkin. (I assure him that many people fall into that category.) And he is learning to recognize sarcasm. A few weeks ago, a friend of the family was visiting on a day that Nigel was supposed to have cleaned his room. Since he hadn’t cleaned it, it looked like a bomb had gone off in there. Nigel was sitting on his bed reading when my friend poked his head in the doorway, surveyed the damage, and said, “It looks good in here.”

Nigel paused for a moment as if considering, and then he said, “I know you’re being sarcastic.”

In spite of the messy room, I was rather proud. And definitely amused.

Sense of Humor Intact

Nigel is now completely well. Generally, we don’t stay down long, but the reasons that I know for certain that he’s well are the following:

a) He is playing with Lego in the living room

b) When I ask him, before dinner, to pick up the Lego, he says this to me—

“Are you developing a sense of humor or am I going deaf?”

Granted, this is probably a line from a movie that I haven’t seen or don’t remember, but still. He’s definitely not sick anymore.

In the ‘Just Trying to Be Helpful’ Category

melting ice cream

Aidan had finished dinner before the rest of us one night last week and had asked to be excused from the table (oh, doesn’t that sound great? Asking to be excused! He more likely said, ‘I’m done; I’m going to go to my room now,’ and I said, ‘Okay, remember to clear your plate’ – yeah, that’s how it went). A moment later, as Nigel and I finished eating, Aidan rounded the corner, coming back into the kitchen.

Aidan: I want to have some ice cream.

Nigel: It’s in the freezer.

Me: [gently chuckling, thinking – where else would it be?]  Thank you, Nigel.

Have a Happy New Year, everyone! Enjoy your celebrations, whether you’re kicking back at home or doing it up big. Just remember to put the ice cream back in the freezer!

About Thanksgiving . . .

Nigel, age 9, verbal but still learning sentence structure:

“Why you think it’s Thursday?”

Translation: Why is Thanksgiving celebrated on Thursdays? Why not Wednesdays, or any other day of the week?

So I told him about Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation, but of course, that does not address his choice of the day of the week. Here we are, five years later, and I’m still looking for the answer. Apparently, George Washington issued an announcement in 1789 that November 26 would be Thanksgiving Day, and it was a Thursday. But why did he choose Thursday? This article states that Washington got the idea from Jonathan Belcher, a governor in New England who, in 1730, proclaimed that Thursday, November 12 was to be a day of thanks throughout the province.

Nigel’s words still echo in my head, five years later: “Why you think it’s Thursday?”

Anybody have any other ideas? I’m off to make mashed potatoes now. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

On Procreation

The Scene: Two brothers, who don’t usually play together, who in fact usually avoid each other, are interacting and playing appropriately together in the family room. Their mother sits nearby at the kitchen table, writing her grocery list and sipping a glass of water. She is pleasantly surprised at this rare occasion of collaboration and, remembering the last time they worked together on something, decides to listen in. It sounds as if their action figures are living on new worlds in other solar systems, and the brothers are the leaders of their own worlds. They are discussing what their worlds are like, who inhabits them, and various other particulars. The younger preteen brother describes his world as being desolate, apocalyptic, and all-male. The older teen brother stops twirling his Lego spaceship around and faces his brother.

Older teen brother: You still need females to launch out the babies.

[The mother begins choking on her water and runs into the kitchen, coughing and spluttering.]

Younger preteen brother: No, I don’t. They’ll make clones.

Killjoy

Nigel (looking at the new watch he received for his birthday): It’s been eighteen hours, six minutes, and thirty-seven seconds.

Aidan (without looking up from his book): Huh?

Nigel: I’m counting the hours, minutes, and seconds.

Aidan: Since what?

Nigel: Since today started.

[Aidan does not respond.]

Nigel (trying to pique his brother’s interest): This is American machinery we’re dealing with.

Aidan (without skipping a beat): It was probably made in China.