978-1572305441

Teddy 103
a group home for developmentally disabled adults. They were out on
the town watching their favorite movie and could hardly contain their
glee at all the familiar characters. They laughed at the outlandish space
aliens, they hissed at Darth Vader, they were tense when Luke Skywalker
was about to launch his devastating missile. At the end of the
show a young woman led the elderly gentlemen out of the theater like
obedient children. Here again was time’s fracture, its veering off in separate
directions. This potential incongruity in our lives is made apparent
by the striking contrast of outward appearance and inner life. There is
chronological time measured by clocks, and there is personal or lived
time, measured by subjective experience. But there is also developmental
time, which one becomes aware of only upon seeing its asynchrony
in certain biologically vulnerable individuals. It is the incongruity of developmental
lines that is so remarkable among adults with autism and
AS. We are not made aware of this crack in the surface of time unless
there is a fault in nature. Time is always at the heart of the matter.
* * *
”What will happen to Teddy when he grows up?” Melody and Sean
look at me expectantly. What can I possibly say to them about the
incongruity of time—about the individual tragedies and triumphs of development?
I cannot lie to them, but neither can I leave them without
hope. The truth lies somewhere between the awful stories Melody read
about in college and the overly optimistic pronouncements of definite
cures that one reads about on the Internet or in the newspaper. Some
children do remarkably well—that is true—better than anyone could
have anticipated years ago. But normal? There is no evidence to support
that view. How could one ever decide that anyway? And besides, normal
is not all it’s cracked up to be. Justin, Jeremy, and Tom have some attributes
that normal adults don’t have. They are gentle, kind, sometimes
naive and innocent, and enjoy many simple, but exquisite, experiences
in life. I hope my children will grow up with some of these attributes as
well. I hope they too can sometimes see without metaphors, can see the
patterns and structure of nature, the continuity of lines, whether composed
of ants on the sidewalk or vines hanging from a tree or beads suspended
from a ceiling. I hope they too can see the infinite variety of
white paint in Robert Ryman’s works and the infinite variety of thunderstorms
that Justin perceives (see Chapter 3). Wisdom is sometimes the
capacity to act innocently, and courage is the capacity to act innocently