Curbside

As I was making coffee yesterday morning I heard a story on NPR about a young special ed kid named Moses. He had been handcuffed to a chair by school security. His mother tearfully described the bruises and cuts in his wrists from the tight cuffs.

It reminded me of David, one of the special ed kids we grew up with. Not because he was abused by school authorities, but because we didn't always understand him, and we didn't always want to be friendly to him.

I first met David when he stumbled into my Drama class in 6th grade. It was his first week at school and I was a little frightened of him. Our drama teacher (who I was also a little frightened of) was very vocal and welcoming to him, in a way that no other teacher had. After David left he said, "David is always so cheerful... that is more than can be said for other kids his age."

I hadn't thought of it that way, and David was changed in my eyes.

We grew up with several special ed students, but David was with us for the longest -- from 6th grade all the way to graduation, where he received a rather loud applause. He changed from someone to be wary of and turned into a charming fixture in his own little way. He was severely autistic, so he was never very responsive despite the huge grin on his face. His interior dialogues must have been very positive and curious. He spoke very loudly in a nasally monotone. He always had lots of toys with him.

In high school he spent a lot of his time with a student aid running errands for the office. During first block when I was drawing in the sunny stairwell in the art building he would always go up the stairs on his rounds, and I always mused how hard he stomped up the stairs. He never hesitated like the other guy (whose name I never caught -- I learned he hesitated because he did not have a sense of depth perception. How heroic that he still tackled those stairs every day, without any urging from his student aid.)

My French teacher also liked David, and always greeted him in a flurry of French, pronouncing his name Dah-VEED. David responded in a remarkable way to this treatment: he would erupt into a monologue about his day. Madame was delighted; she mused that sometimes one needed to follow a different path to get into the mind, and perhaps French was such a path for David. She began counting with him in French every morning when he came to deliver his daily news paper. She would point to something in the paper and count, and David would repeat.

Un (un)
Deux (deux)
trois (trois)
quatre (quatre)
cinq (cinq)
six (six)
sept (sept)
huit (huit)
neuf (neuf)
dix (dix)