Wampum

One . warm . night . four . ch . ild . ren
st . ood . in . front . of . a . baker . ee shop.
No . one . k . new . them. No . one . k . new
where . they . had . come . from.

Sam read the large type para off the back cover of the first of Gertrude Chandler Warner's The Boxcar Children.

On the walk to the grocery store Sam said "I'm a dinosaur in the jungle", so I said "I'm the jungle and I eat dinosaurs". Sam replied "I'm a dinosaur and I eat the jungle!" and mouthed my arm. On the walk back from grocery shopping and the Thank Dog Its Posted (Koufax final tabs) mandatory stop at the wine shop (thanks for the donations, particularly the last $20), where I said "Come on Monkey Boy", Sam said to me "I'm no Monkey Boy. You're the Monkey Boy." As we walked he ran through his stock in trade. "I'm so ang - er - y", to which I replied "No, I'm so ang - er - y". And so it went. He was smiling as I appropriated each of his texts, until we crossed the street, together but not hand-in-hand, and got to the usual break-away-place, when he broke away and ran up the street.

From that awful starting point, the months of unremarkable but incurable sinus infection immediately following the MMR stick, to lethargy, to silence, to Joe's "Do you know Sammy's deaf?" question one night after baby sitting. Die stunde nulle. The world stopped. Life without music. Implants or sign? Deaf Culture. Sign. Then the ABR. Brainstem auditory evoked response to stim. Not deaf. Hears. Hears TeleTubbies, but nothing else. Not deaf. Something else ... something else... no eyes. the hands. autism.

We work for eyes. For reciprocity, turn taking, the elements of conversation. What sound does a duck make? What sound does a cow make? Eyes. Eyes. Eyes. Eyes. Everything is for eyes. On the swing, each push costs eyes, then signs for more and again. Everything is paid for. Eyes. More. Again. What sound does a frog make? Every complex thoughtless action decomposed to steps. We are discreet trials. We are applied behavior analysis. We are medline. We are uncontrolled tantrums arising from invisible causes.

Sam scampered up the sidewalk towards the house with his grocery store loot, running his weird broken-field disjointed-dinosaur run, the last half-block. I was beyond happy. Sammy speaks carefully, with less run-on-and-on than Kezzie who's three, but he's as present as any in this world bounded by birds, and simply Gracie's younger brother.

[note from mb: eric added some to the original, but I made him take it back to the first draft. I think it's perfect this way.]