The Boy Who Loved Windows: Opening The Heart And Mind Of A Child Threatened With Autism
Patricia Stacey
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 073820966X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
was four months old, Walker was looking at us occasionally. We sometimes wondered if he was farsighted, since usually we were only able to win his attention from across the room or if we stood above him, never up close. Once or twice, his gaze was so intense as to be disarming, as though he was looking right into us; yet most of the time he seemed only vaguely interested. Our thoughts about who this boy was were veering wildly. For a period of time, when Walker was three months old, we believed
differing levels exist even among the highest of functioning.” “I think he might be,” said Dawn. (I cornered her at my dining room table while Walker crawled into the living room and offered her a cup of tea.) “Kaufman considers himself ‘rehabilitated,’ ‘completely recovered’—off the ‘spectrum,’” I said. “How do you know that?” “I called the publicity department of his parents’ institute and asked them. When I asked what his personality was like, the woman giggled a little bit. I had a
photos, but I will never forget the pain I caused when I eventually called to ask her to send no more gifts. The friendship grew thin and strained, and I mark this event as the major wound in a relationship that didn’t survive. The rift in our friendship was my fault. I stopped calling. I had always been attracted to profoundly sensitive people; now I simply didn’t have any more to give to an other person’s sensitivities. Yet I still miss Victoria’s wit, her intelligence, her stories. A few days
several times before, but I always dismissed it as a romantic fancy. Yet I was flat up against a lot of evidence that people with autism have an acute sense of awareness, not just in their senses but in their psyches. (Yet how strange that they might not understand certain jokes. Was it possible that they were just tuned in to different aspects of reality?) In any case, it seemed to me a brilliant commentary on contemporary life for a kid to call his television “mom.” We viewed other videotapes
dinner, he disappeared into Walker’s room, I into Elizabeth’s. Sometimes those landmasses moved together into closely fitting formations that made for continuity and stability—no earthquakes. Other times the masses drifted apart, glacial. Cliff helped in all the ways he could. He still did much of the shopping, brought take-out home some nights, and he always took Walker to appointments where blood would be drawn; I couldn’t manage it. At night, Cliff read to Walker or they talked quietly at