There was the ENT who, after he had determined that Charlie did not have a hearing problem and we had mentioned “autism,” said “Adios.”

There was the pediatrician who, noting that ten-month-old Charlie had just started to roll over and was not crawling and not trying to crawl, said to me, “So this is what happens: He cries and you go right over and pick him up?”

There was the pediatric neurologist who charged a “fee” before giving me the forms so Charlie could get an MRI when he was 5 years old.

There was the child psychiatrist who shut the door to her very small, windowless office and, when 7-year-old Charlie did not stay in his seat, said “Why is he not sitting still? Why is he so hyper?”

As we left the ENT, Jim had said, “He heard the word ‘autism’ and he doesn’t want any part of it.”

As I carried Charlie out from the pediatrician’s office, I said over and over to myself: “But no matter what we do, he doesn’t move his legs and arms to crawl.”

As I wrote out a check to the man at the pediatric neurologist’s front desk, I said, “I don’t know about this.”

As I tried to get Charlie to sit back in his chair (he did, for five seconds), the child psychiatrist read what I had written on the forms out loud, then said she wanted to double Charlie’s dose of Risperdal.

I guess you could say we have not had the best of experiences with doctors in our Autismland journey. I should say that the pediatricians who we met in St. Paul were kindly and sympathetic; it was they who attended to Charlie’s ear infections and had to deliver the “we’ll wait till February and see if he’s got any words” sentence and then, in the next visit, to say the “a-word.” By the time Charlie was six, I had concluded that the best thing for us to do was to find a pediatrics practice with a staff of different doctors, a decent-sized waiting room, an office that was ten minutes from our house, and walk-in hours on schooldays so we could bring Charlie in without having to schedule an appointment.

Practical? Indeed yes. Cynical? Probably.

So why did we drive an hour and a half to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and then wait another hour, to see one certain pediatric neurologist?

“We go way back,” the doctor said to Charlie who was leaning, face down, on the examination table. It was 5.30pm. We had first taken Charlie to him in early 2003, because Charlie’s head-banging was happening more and frequently. I had initially hoped to take Charlie to another pediatric neurologist who came with stellar recommendations, but he was not accepting new patients, and so I put down Charlie’s name for an appointment with another doctor—who, as it turns out, has been the one doctor whom Jim and I have found listens to our sometimes chaotically expressed accounts of Charlie’s progress, and with whom we have been able to have a conversation about what to do for Charlie: Medications to try? How much? How often? Side-effects? What happens when we take Charlie off the medication? The doctors always notes that school–education—should be our primary focus, and that the medication was to help Charlie do a bit better.

So when the doctor went to work for CHOP, we decided we would still go to see him, whatever the driving distance, whether or not the doctor was on our list of “in-network providers.”

Charlie kept his head buried on the exam table but did start shooting a smile in the doctor’s direction. We had not seen him since last March when Charlie was doing better, but not as well as he is now, and we enthuasiastically described Charlie’s school program, his home ABA, piano lessons. “Charlie, do you like school?” asked the doctor. No answer, then “eye oooo” without Charlie raising his head. Jim had mentioned that we were planning to get Mexican food afterwards, at which the doctor said “I love guacamole,” which evoked a “guakahmolay” from Charlie. “Geen guakahmolay!”

“A lot of echolalia,” noted the doctor. And then reminisced about a Mexican restaurant he used to visit but too many chips are too many chips……

“Charlie really just started that in the past year,” I noted. (Speech is speech—nothing like the sound of one’s child’s voice.) “He never did it before.” The doctor recommended taking Charlie off of Zoloft as it overlaps somewhat with the Risperdal Charlie also takes, and we went over how to do this gradually (we once took Charlie “cold turkey” off Zoloft and he head-banged in a driveway on the way to school). “He’s doing good now,” said Jim. “He’s growing up, too” the doctor said. Jim mentioned the autism conference and we talked about the Combating Autism Act. We all agreed that we would like to see more of the $1 billion used for the needs of older autistic children and adults—”what about clinical services for teenagers transitioning out of school?” the doctor asked.

“I always like seeing you guys,” said the doctor as we left. “Bye, Charlie.”

“Bye, dokk-tor.”

We stopped in New Hope for the promised Mexican food, which we ate in our car in a parking lot with a view of the Delaware River, obscured by warm, clingy mists; we drove home listening to this (Charlie’s choice) and finished up the rest of the rice, refried beans, and corn tortillas at home.

Who said a visit to the doctor can’t be positive—about Charlie’s progressing—-and fun?

This evening Charlie rediscovered what was once one of his favorite items when we lived in our old house: A bucket of photos. We had set these aside—not exactly hidden but not exactly just “out there.”

It has often been the case that what Charlie likes and loves—such as the ocean, for one—has been the source of incredible anxiety that has turned into a severe behavior squall. Gradually we figured out that the reason for the anxiety was Charlie’s fear of losing some desired object—of leaving the ocean, or an amusement park ride ending, or there being no more cake.

We struggle, or muddle, through helping Charlie transition through leaving the ocean or California. (Of late, a calendar with photographs of the various houses he will be at with a photo of himself to velcro on each day has helped.) When once you leave the ocean, you’re not there, and no matter what behaviors/tantrums/obsessive speech (“beach house beach house beeeeaaach house”) Charlie might say, it would be clear to him that we were home, the ride was done, the cake was finished. But when it comes to favorite objects—-then there is the possibility of misplacing, of losing them, and Charlie, with his limited speech, has rarely been able to indicate where something might be.

And then, while we still living at our old house, Charlie started to put his absolute favorite photos (him on a merry-go-round, the swings, his most beloved ride of all—-the ferris wheel) into a crack at the top of the hardwood stairs.

At first it was a small crack and the photos would stick and I, overjoyed at Charlie’s cries for “hepp hepp help,” ran over with a pair of scissors and then a paring knife to pry out his objects of desire. Alas, too often they were simply stuck, or my efforts to secure them resulted in the photos falling into the dark depths beneath the stairs.

Then we had a real problem.

The crack had swallowed up a portable photo album’s worth of pictures by the time Jim sealed the crack (in the dark hours of the night, or Charlie would have picked the stuff out).

When we moved into my in-laws’ house back in June, the photos in their ghost-faced trick or treat bucket were set to the side and Charlie, in his new surroundings, simply did not ask or look for them. Until today: Something in our recent California trip having spurred his memory? Or maybe he has been thinking about them—as his recent talk might suggest—because the first photos he ferreted out were the Polaroids we took of his ABA therapists back in 1999-2000 in Minnesota and then in 2000-2001 in Missouri.

“Stella! Stella red car, Stellas red car!”

“Keh-ee!”

“Beth! Beth green car.”

“Shiree!”

“Kristy, Kristy b’own car, Kristy white car……”

“Hey wait a moment, Kristy hadda blue car?” I said.

“Kristy b’owb car, Kristy white.”

Aha. Charlie was talking about Christie #2, whose brown car disappeared after she got a used white car, not Kristy #1.

Charlie spread out the photos on our bed, three Polaroids on top, and went under the covers. After a half-hour, he got up and ran to his own bed. I asked him if he would like his photos?.

“Yes, foe-toes.”

I toted some back via the ghost bucket and carefully carried in the remaining pile, careful to keep those three favorites on top.

I’m thinking we’ll be able to hang on to them—to hold on—more securely this time around.

Who has seen the wind
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bend down their heads
The wind is passing by.

This is a stanza of a poem I first read in a second grade reader, I think with a line drawing of a tree with its branches set askew to show the wind bending through. I was probably drawn to it because the poet’s first name was almost mine; because her whole name—Christina Georgina Rossetti—was so melodious; because of the poem’s nursery-rhyme tone, the i rhyming with by, the slant rhyme of wind and bend—because of the sounds of the poem, and the poetry of the writer’s very name.

And it is poetry—not science, not genetics, not neurology, not molecular biology—that, I often think, has helped me to understand Charlie.

I am more than curious to follow the latest research about autism, about what complicated combinations of genes might be involved, about what is unusual in the “wiring” of the brains of autistic persons. While such studies may ultimately explain the “what” of autism—what is autism, what causes it—I travel back to poetry to get answers that are a little more immediate.

“Wendy bue car, Kristy bue car, b’ack oh-voh, b’ack oh-voh, b’ack rekk-tan-goh.” Charlie spoke this stream of shape-and-color-talk in an exchange with me. It was 10pm and he was, once again, wide awake despite a full day at school, afternoon ABA, and a walk-run to the train station before dinner. In fact, he was completely alert, jabbering snatches of syllables, and running through the house with sudden bursts of speed and jumps. (Sometimes Jim and I joke-sigh, too bad he isn’t in school now at 9pm and after.)

“How about we try this puzzle?” I said as I found him sitting in a messy nest of blankets, pullows, soft and squishy balls, and a plush snowman on his bed. The design was Thomas the Tank train and two other trains—I do not know any of their names except for Thomas’, Charlie never having become a fan (pace Charlotte Moore’s noting on p. 177 of George and Sam that “an admiration for the works of the Reverend W. Awdry is almost a diagnostic requirement of autism”). In the background were fireworks, a ferris wheel and a carousel, all gleaming with egg-yolk-and-white colors so they would glow in the dark. Charlie set to work (he tends to do the frame and a section first, as Conor does in these photos).

Charlie started talking more and more as he did the puzzle (and as the hour got later). There were some strings of rhyming vowel sounds—like Rossetti’s i and by—that I responded to, in like rhyming fashion—and then the longer phrase of therapists’ names and their cars and the shapes and the colors. One is Charlie’s current speech therapist, the other the first lead therapist in his home ABA program, and they look nothing alike. It’s the fact that they both have blue cars that (I suspect) caused Charlie to mention them together: Charlie tends to see such random associations of people as reasons for them having something in common, all because of the color of their cars. I think he has been talking about the speech therapist and (as he did tonight) “shapes! black shapes. b’ue ovoh, b’ue rectangoh, b’ue shapes!” because that was a program he learned with the ABA therapist, some seven years ago.

And then, when he tries to talk about all this, Charlie tends to get stuck on the very sounds of the words, on the rhyme and repetition of “blue”; unless we ask him to speak slowly “rectango” and “trywango” still sound as if they are the same. Charlie then says these words over and over—”stims” on them—and to a certain beat.

Just as there is repetition of sounds and rhythm and meter in a poem, all of which result in a poem–in Charlie’s case, a phrase—sticking in one’s head and on one’s tongue.

That is how I try to understand Charlie’s repetitive speech, especially when its content does not seem attached to the immediate reality around him. Charlie does still speak a lot of what sounds like babble; living with autism and Charlie has been teaching me that you’ve got to look beyond what his words say to get his meaning. You’ve got to figure out the sense of the sounds.

When one learns to interpret poetry in school, one is taught to look not only at what the words say, but at also “how” they say it, at what is the “music” of the words:

The sound must seem an echo of the sense

as the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope wrote in an Essay on Criticism.

“HOO dihoo.”said Charlie. He was three-quarters done with the puzzle.

“Hoop dee doo?” I asked, remembering this DVD.

“Muiwee Zheff!” Charlie raised his eyes to grin at me: I had figured it out.

Not that I’m so sure of what “it” is (a memory of the colors of that Wiggles DVD? the silly party polka atmosphere?). Just as we know the wind is passing from the way the trees bend down, so I know that Charlie’s speech or babble or verbalizations are signs of something else—of him communicating.

I have to keep looking close, and listening.

“Won more gezackly!”

Charlie echoed me with a smile: It was 8.45pm and he was opening the refrigerator door for “one more” orange—”exactly” one and no more, I told him. He looked at me; he took out his orange; he sat down in his favorite swivel chair in the living room. “Giff, Mom!” he said as he handed me a piece of pith.

Charlie knew that a pack of sushi and a “bread (a gluten-free English muffin, eight of which I had bought yesternight in New York while Charlie sat down to eat with Jim and stowed (defrosting) at the bottom of my bag, beneath a book and some extra clothes). He knew that there were more muffins right before his eyes in the fridge, not to mention half a bag of frozen vegetables.

If he sees it, Charlie will eat it, until every last frozen soybean or bite of watermelon is gone: Charlie has always been a good eater (since the days when he nursed as a baby). I am not surprised that he has trouble knowing when to stop: Charlie is definitely a growing boy (and we went on a long walk to the post office this afternoon, too). Charlie is on medication, one of whose side-effects is increased appetite, and, while we can explain “side effects” to him, he is not able to use language to tell us what it feels like. (Hence I have more than appreciated comments from autistic adults about the effects of the medication on them.) And, we have long noted a disconnect between mind and body for Charlie: His stomach might be bloated, but his eyes see that there’s more in the bag, and his mind says, Eat!, his hand reaches.

I dislike hiding food or anything from Charlie: I would much rather leave things where they ought to be and teach him, “you just eat some at a time” or “you just watch the DVD once.” As it is, Charlie has shown a remarkable aptitude for finding whatever desired object, from cassette tapes to chocolate, I might try to hide. To be honest, I have to say “go Charlie” when he finds me out—it shows he is keeping his eyes and ears open. Indeed, it often seems to me that Charlie gets a bigger thrill at me “catching” him and then we get into an exhausting pattern of him noting when I am preoccupied and then dashing off to find the no-long-so-hidden item.

(I guess that might speak to Charlie’s theory of mind?)

So when I came up from folding laundry to find Charlie attempting to pull off the plastic on some frozen hot dog buns (foraged from the back of the freezer, as evidenced by the packs of frozen green beans and TV dinners on the floor), I shook my head at him with a smile, while assuring Grandpa, who had exclaimed over the thunks of food on linoleum, that nothing was amiss.

“Charlie, how about we put a bread into your lunchbox?”

I took out Charlie’s pack of muffins; Charlie handed me the hot dog buns and put the food on the floor back in the freezer.

“Bwead, lunssbocks,” he smiled. Then “oranges?” And he took one, said “p’ate!” and opened a cabinet, and ran off, to come back and ask for that “one more orange.”

I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but there’s a pack of gluten-free brownies at the bottom of the left-hand refrigerator drawer, camouflaged under vegetables and some chocolate pudding: No matter what time you go to sleep (and Charlie fell asleep on Monday night at 1.30am……), you’ve got to get up early to stay ahead of a boy like Charlie (and I somehow did, and he ran smiling to meet the schoolbus before Jim and I were even out the door).

“Back-pakk!” (Said while wrapped up in the covers of our bed sometime around 1pm—-the three of us, all groggy from the effects of time zone travel, woke up at 12noon when my sister-in-law accidentally walked into our room.)

“Socks soosz.” (Said with a very worried and intense look at me—Charlie often seems to want to go somewhere else when we are home, and then to go home when we are out.)

“Wendy bue car Wendy, Kristy bue car. Kristy bue car. Wendy bue car, blue oval!” (Said on the train to Newark, said on the PATH train into lower Manhattan, said as walked through the Winter Garden near the World Trade Center site—and while looking straight at me.)

“Blue oval, black regg-tan-go!” (Said with that look at me.)

(Here’s where I step into what I would call a conversation with Charlie.)

“White oval,” I say.

“White regg-tan-go!”

“Purple heart,” I say.

“Purple heart. White oval, white regg-tan-go, blackheart.”

“Black diamond,” I say.

“Black diamond, black star, white heart!”

“We’re talking about shapes.”

“Blue regg-tan-to, white star, white circle, shapes!”

I am not entirely sure how Charlie got started on these exchanges. He has always been drawn to colors and shapes, perhaps because they are things that he can readily identify and apply his words too; colors and shapes were the first reception language programs that Charlie learned when he started doing ABA back in the fall of 1999. (For a long time when he was about 3-5 years old, two ziploc bags, one containing a set of laminated paper squares of different colors, and the other a set of laminated paper shapes of different colors, were his favorite items.) And calling a rather scripted back and forth exchange about different-colored shapes is not exactly a conversation in the sense of talking socially with others.

And yet. Think about the basics of the formulaic “small talk” we strike up with people on an elevator, or when offering more than a “hi” to an acquaintance, or when starting to speak to someone on the phone. “How are you?/I’m fine.” “Bad weather we’ve been having./Oh yes.” “A lot of people here already./There are.” Are not these “ice-breaker” phrases scripts that we have learned, and learned to spin variations of?

My longest conversation with Charlie today about the shapes and cars and their colors happened while we were pausing to look at a photo display of the rebuilding of the WTC site at the Winter Garden: Movement often seems to help spur Charlie’s speech, and (hoping also to get Charlie some good exercise so he might sleep better) we took a big walk today on the west side of Manhattan, to the sometimes melodic sound of Charlie saying “sushi sushi sushi sushi sushi” on and on. We paused at the Irish Hunger Memorial and at Pier 32 (or the pilings that are in the pier’s place) across from Canal Street; Charlie admired the water, shining and softly lapping in the dark. It was warm and a thick, thick mist caused Charlie to rub the back of his head and, as I suggested, to “puh you hoodonn!”

At Chelsea Piers, we paused to admire the wall-size photos of when these were working piers: Longshoremen in suits at a Communion breakfast. African-American athletes on a steamer to attend the Olympics. Solders waving as their came back from wars. Horses and carriages in the cobblestone street and a sign saying “Titanic” in the background.

“Cake!” Charlie broke from his sushi litany when he saw the gymnasium area where he went to M’s December 9th birthday party. We ran across the West Side Highway and caught the subway (Charlie’s eyes searched for an empty seat), and soon we were up in Columbus Circle for the desired Japanese food item—-and back on two subways, and running amid the puddles and in the mist to get back to the PATH station. Charlie laughed and grinned while holding Jim’s hand, and ran without (as far as I can tell) panting. He reached for my hand too, was careful to push my coat sleeve up, and then bent over double chortling loudly, then straightened his body as the three of us ran.

Charlie is a boy of few words but lots of communication: Living with Charlie, living with autism, have taught me that language is only one way that we humans can express ourselves.

We made the train and the way Charlie sat up stiff and attentive and beamed when the car CD player broadcast Jimi Hendrix said all I need to know.

“Turnahn musix!” Charlie called as soon as we got into the black car at the Philadelphia Airport. He had been singing a certain lilting fragment on and off in the last hour of our flight back from California: I flipped through the CD case but could not find Charlie’s request. I pulled out a purple paisley-decorated disc: “Jimi Hendrix?”

“Hendricks, yes,” said Charlie and he sat straight up on his knees, beaming. Suddenly lines of white light and sparkling circles burst out in front of us from Lincoln Financial Field, where the Philadelphia Eagles were about to play the Atlanta Falcons. Charlie’s head kept turning from side to side as we drove past Citizens Bank Park where we had seen the Phillies play back in July, past downtown Philadelphia, and, after a ways, past the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, Palmyra being where Jim’s best friend Mike who died almost three years ago had last lived: Another sentimental journey.

It’s always a journey in Autismland, every day, is it not—-I turn around to glance at Charlie in the backseat and still see the big baby whose wet, black-eyed head I first beheld more than 9 1/2 years ago in a room at the Missouri Baptist Medical Center, and then see those same eyes narrowing as Charlie concentrates on “Little Wing.” And maybe because, as the parent of a disabled child, one tends to think about “big questions“—”what will happen when Charlie is retirement age?”—all the time, one often feels that one is traveling at least two different time zones, and when to sleep, or when to start brewing the morning coffee, is hard to tell.

Charlie’s sleep habits have been so erratic for the month of December—staying up regularly until 1 or 2 am, taking a several hours’ nap at school—that I figured going to the West Coast and being on Pacific Standard Time, three hours “behind” time in New Jersey, would wreak further havoc on his biological clock, and that is indeed the case. It is 2.30am here in New Jersey (11pm back in California) and Charlie is completely wide awake and speaking a steady stream of words or syllables. (Tuesday morning, when he goes back to school, is going to be interesting.) Charlie could not sleep at all yesterday; I know he knew it was his last night in California and he was awake till 1am.

This worked out to his advantage as far as air travel: Charlie, roused at 5.30am, went right back to sleep during our 7.15am flight and only awoke in the last hour and a half. I have accordingly become convinced that the best times to fly with an autistic child, or at least with my autistic child, are in the evening on a red-eye flight when one’s child has had a full day and is glad to sit, or at the crack of dawn, when one’s child can promptly go back to sleep. If there is one lesson I have learned from all these days and years with Charlie—-and as it is 2007 and Charlie was born in 1997, I can start speaking of a decade with Charlie—it is that you do what you gotta do to keep him happy, yourself more or less calm, and so be it.

On the plane, a 5-month-old cried and wailed; Jim and I thought: “We’ve heard louder.” Across the aisle, a black warm-up clad Asian mother passed a steady stream of bagels, muffins, cream cheese, and juice to her three children in the row before her (they also had DVDs, Bratz dolls, and a Game Boy), while attending to a preschool-age boy: When you’re traveling, it helps to keep everyone content with creature comforts.

That might not be bad advice when you’re getting ready for another year’s journey in Autismland.

Wishing all of our Autismland friends and family a New Year of peace and joy, learning and loving, and witness and hope.

(And, around here, not a lot of sleep: I, as you may have gathered, need only a few hours, and I think Charlie is following suit.)

We spent our last afternoon in California walking down by the bay in Berkeley, where my mother recalled childhood camping trips with her father and siblings (sleeping under the stars because my grandfather preferred to camp tentfree, hiking while carrying the sleeping bags, and eating pork ‘n’ beans kept cool while tethered to a rock in the river), and eating one more dinner in Oakland’s Chinatown with assorted members of my family, including my Ngin Ngin. Walking down 8th Street my father reminicised about his father (my Yeh Yeh)’s store, Tai Wah, and how two of my aunts (who enjoyed being “two little old ladies” in New York City when they attended Witness and Hope, the October 27th autism conference) had, once upon a time in their girlhood, taken the bus from their West Oakland apartment to Chinatown to open up Tai Wah so Yeh Yeh could get some rest.

It has been more than a year since I was in California. Last Christmas, we just could not make the trip. Charlie had just started at a new private autism school and, while he liked it, it was not the time to embark on a transcontinental ride of a few hours 10,000 feet up. It was the first time since I went away to college twenty years ago that I have not come back to California for the holidays.

The last time we came out here for Christmas in 2004, Charlie came down on Christmas Eve with a raging stomach flu and spent all but the last day curled up on the couch while my mom hurried around doing laundry. (The trip had not started on a high note exactly: Jim and I had picked up Charlie from school with rug burn on his forehead, after he got upset during library.) Little did we know that the beginning of 2005—-when Charlie started to have major behavior and therefore learning trouble in his public school program—would put us on a path that led to our taking him out of school for a month one November day and leaving our house for my in-laws’ basement and a school Charlie likes so much that mention of his teacher and aides yesterday evoked an eager tone in his voice.

From the ride on the airplane on December 23rd, to a visit to an autism center, offering incense at a Buddhist temple, biking to the ocean in Golden Gate Park, and walking across the Golden Gate Bridge—and one day of post-holiday holiday ache (because in Autismland, a week of great days is not the same without one tougher day)—it has been a great week.

But I think the greatest moment came this evening.

Charlie had showered and was sneaking out clementines from the refrigerator. “Photos, turn on!” he called to me, to see the photo slideshow on this computer. I took this as a possible sign that Charlie might be okay about leaving California tomorow, after him frowning and making whining sort of sounds when we showed him his calendar/picture schedule and talked about “going to Grandpa’s house”; Charlie usually watches this photo show on school nights and associates it (I think) with being home in New Jersey.

“PoPo!” Charlie called and turned his head towards the kitchen, where my mother was. “PoPo! Sit!”

Charlie pulled over his chair towards the computer screen and touched the chair beside him.

I think he was asking my mother to watch his photo show with him, which she did.

The experts call this “joint attention.”

I call it, Charlie, you’ve come so very far and I can’t even see where you might be going.

Those are three of Charlie’s favorite things, all provided courtesy of the Golden Gate Bridge.

People: On a day of upper 50s temperatures, two days before the end of the year, the small, angular-shaped parking lot beside the bridge was packed. A tour guide read aloud an explanatory plaque in Mandarin as 15 tourists took photos of it. Asian women with their hair color ranging from golden orange to black strolled up the path to the bridge in suede boots with handbags under arms, or gripping small children’s hands. Three cyclists, the oldest women speaking a Scandinavian language, carefully passed us. Several generations of a Latino family walked by, the youngest girl wearing a fleece hat, a fleece hood, and a pink scarf in the shape of a rabbit.

Charlie (once he had shaken off the last bit of sleep from a car nap) kept stopping, arms stiff in front of his body and his sleeves pulled over his hands. He was looking in the distance, at all those someones moving beneath the rust-red beams of the bridge.

Heights. Ever since he was a toddler and Jim took Charlie for regular walks across the Selby Avenue bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota, we have noted that there is something about being on a bridge that appeals to Charlie.

Charlie has bridges in the blood: My mother’s father was a bridge inspector, a job requiring him to walk atop the Golden Gate and bridges up and down the state of California. This afternoon we all got a good look from the bottom up at those mighty girders, seemingly so stable and yet swaying in the wind coming off the Pacific.

Again and again, Charlie ran to look down towards the water, and I think the view from the bridge’s top would intrigue him no less.

(It is also the case that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers were Charlie’s favorite to watch when he went to the circus.)

It took about forty minutes to walk across and then back over the bridge. Noise was constant from a couple of lanes of traffic; to our right and then our left was the kind of vista postcards are made of: a lean triangle with San Francisco’s skyscrapers and Victorian houses planted on it; a far longer, bigger wedge, with the East Bay where my parents lives; and in the middle Alcatraz and also Angel Island, where my grandmother Ngin-Ngin was interned for some months before setting food in America back in the 1920s.

“Go-denn gayt….brijjjj!”

Water. It was splashing a long drop below, and it was pale jade green.

Charlie, as has been regularly noted on this blog, is a boy who loves the water. Swimming in ocean waves is his preferred way of interacting with the water, but swimming pools can alike be places of liquid delight and visiting an aquarium is pretty good, too. And being over the water while on a bridge.

Charlie has his share of trouble with transitions and I find it somewhat counterintuitive that he should seem so home upon a bridge, which is a sort of transitional structure, a way to go from one place to the next (metaphorically as well as actually). And yet his face and the skip in his step said that Charlie was peaceful easy-feeling and downright perky, too.

Perhaps being on a bridge—-in wind and water and dry land and air all simultaneously—is not a transitional spot for Charlie. Perhaps the symbolic, cliché meaning of bridges is nothing to Charlie.

Perhaps a bridge is just home and where he needs to be.

Kwan Yin is the Buddhist goddess of love and mercy and—as my father told me so long ago I can’t remember when—the favorite goddess of my grandmother Ngin-Ngin. And, as long as I can remember, there has been a white ceramic statue of Kwan Yin in her house, each finger and rustle of her robes and lotus petal carefully sculpted and needing a good wipe of the dust cloth (as I also remember from the times when my sister and I helped to clean Ngin-Ngin’s house).

Charlie, my dad’s arm around him, bowed before Kwan Yin today, in the temple of the Ching Chung Taoist Association of America on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown, across the street from Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral at the intersection of Grant and California streets and right amid San Francisco’s famous straight-up-and-down hills. Charlie ran out of the car and up the steep slope, full of happy energy.

After attending Witness and Hope, the October 27th NYC autism advocacy conference, one of aunts had asked about taking Charlie to a Buddhist temple to bow before his ancestors and, specifically, my grandfather Yeh Yeh, who died in 1975. We met her and another one of my aunts and a cousin who is just around Charlie’s age and took the elevator up to the temple, which occupies a few rooms on the fourth floor above various Chinatown businesses. Red was the predominant color, with gold filigree gleaming throughout, small pyramid piles of pears and apples for the gods, and statues of the gods. The sweet stuffy smell of incense filled the air.

We went into a room whose walls were lined in white rectangular tiles and up near the ceiling was one with Yeh Yeh’s photos as I always remember him, and of a much younger Ngin Ngin—the matriarch who chopped squid or chicken backs or bundles of choy with fearless whacks of her cleaver on a round cutting board and who regularly cooked endless amounts of dishes for family dinners that my cousins and I ate on TV trays while watching Hogan’s Heroes or Love American Style. “You light the heng here,” my dad said as he took three sticks of incense and, standing behind Charlie, lit them, and they bowed three times together.

“Happy Birday two-you, hah-pee bir-day two-you,” sang Charlie.

“The heng are like candles, they are,” I said, and Charlie sang again when we burned more to Kwan Yin’s statue with its gentle smile.

Charlie was smiling too, digging into rice and sweet and sour pork as his cousin sipped her bubble tea, and then as we walked the streets of Chinatown. My aunt had bought a Chinese New Year’s decoration with a gaudily colored lion’s head for Charlie’s cousin to bring to school and I wanted to get one for Charlie’s class, too. As I located one in a store selling stationery and red envelopes–hong bao—Charlie ran into the middle of the store, bent over double at the waist, and made what I’ll call a lion cub-esque noise that had the effect of bringing startled (maybe shocked) looks onto the faces of employees and shoppers.

It was a “he has autism” moment that I let pass. I think the room went silent but I could not hear it—-those mini-roars (usually part of some script in Charlie’s mind) have become so much a part of the course of a day’s conversation with Charlie. I walked over to him and showed him the lion’s head decoration: “We can give it to your teacher!” I said, as business sort of resumed among the disoriented onlookers.

In Autismland, strange and unstrange are relative—or, as I like to think of it, when you are raising an autistic child, the strange becomes unstrange—no longer “abnormal” or “bizarre” or “odd” or “mysterious”—and, very often, sometimes a thing of awe. And time and again what I learn from being Charlie’s mother is that what seems quite unsurprising to me, is strange and beyond to him.

We drove to Golden Gate Park and rented bikes and helmets for my dad, Jim, and Charlie, who immediately looked worried when a helmet (not his) and a bike (not his) were presented to him (only now does it occur to me, when we told Charlie we were going to “ride bikes,” he may well have expected that his bike and bike helmet were going to appear here in northern California, magically transported from Grandpa’s New Jersey garage). Jim and Charlie rode off with my dad behind. An hour plus later, I heard a stream of vowel sounds coming from a familiar voice, saw my dad and then Charlie riding strong, Jim beside him.

“We rode to the ocean,” Jim proclaimed, “and he did–not–like–it.” Because, Jim noted quietly, the ocean holds a whole set of associations for Charlie and they do not involve biking in December with Gong Gong, waves so huge that signs on the beach warn “people have died here,” and Charlie in his winter coat and socks:

Nothing looked so strange to Charlie this afternoon as that Pacific Ocean and several beachcomber walkers, clad in polarfleece and sweaters.

In the car crossing the Bay Bridge, Jim compared the scene of Charlie encountering an ocean he was not expecting to “Lewis and Clark and Charlie.” (After all, Christopher Columbus was not expecting to find “America” when he landed in 1492………) “Hey Cholly, what was that ocean you saw?” Jim said.

“Pahzihixx oshun,” said Charlie. And then “wah-ermelon, wahtermeh’on, I want eat wahtermeh’on!”

My parents made sure to stop at the grocery store for some, and my mom quickly cut up the big chunks into smaller pieces: “Not so fast, sweetie!” she said as Charlie all but gulped the pink mush down. He washed his hands, endured her washing his face, and stomped happily off to practice at his new keyboard and then to dine on Chinese food with his great-great-uncle.

Burning heng for Yeh Ye and Kwan Yin, riding bikes in San Francisco, sighting the Pacific in December—the unexpected becoming the I’ve-done-that: One day’s mission (of mercy, of love) accomplished in Autismland.

We drove down the Nimitz freeway (“now we call it 880,” my mom said) under a completely blue sky, thanks to a strong wind. The hills rose green to our left as we sped past low-slung hi-tech company headquarters, Charlie sitting straight up in the backseat between Jim and me. I had showed him the calendar his ABA therapist had made for him to mark off the days we are here at my parents’ house in California and then—come Sunday—-the square divided by a diagonal line, half with Gong Gong’s and Po Po’s house and half with “Grappa’s house” in New Jersey. “We’re going to something like a school,” I said.

Charlie’s cheeks pulled tight: No wonder, I thought, here we are on vacation. But I prefer to tell him what will happen in advance, even if this makes him anxious; on the trip home—driving back up the unfamiliar highway and stopping at a Target painted in golden oranges, browns and yellows with the red bull’s eye obscured—Charlie in his disorientation cried out sharply.

These worries (unlike yesterday’s) passed and Charlie, once back in my parents’ house, was smiling, searching for clementines and “tisshoe” (a napkin) to peel on the white couch (not that my parents mind). “Payano!” He jumped to try out the new keyboard we had gotten for him and then ran to get his coat and shoes to have a dinner in Chinatown. Jim and I went out to celebrate (belatedly) our 11th anniversary at a favorite restaurant in Berkeley. An Asian family was dining at the table next to us, a baby carrier on the bench. I surmised it was a boy from the blue baby pillow and blanket, and one blue-buntinged foot. The baby was sleeping and, as his mother turned to look at him or rock him gently, I remembered how, nine years ago, we had dined at this very restaurant with my parents and Charlie, a baby in a blue hooded coat.

My parents took me to this same restaurant after I graduated from college and for many a birthday, too—to mark the stages of my own growing up. The sleeping baby made me think of how far he has come.

And of how far he has to go. In truth, I think about this question all the time and every day: What will happen when Charlie finishes school (at the age of 21, in New Jersey)? What will his life as an adult be like? What about after we are gone?

We got a few glimpses towards how to answer these questions today when we visited what I had referred to as a “school” to Charlie on the ride down the freeway. We visited Friends of Children with Special Needs (FCSN), a center that provides after-school programs for children and day programs for adults with special needs, as well as supported living and job training programs for adults. I had read about the center on the internet (I posted this on Autism Vox earlier this month). FCSN is located in a community, in a town called Fremont; there are plans to open up another center in the South Bay.

Charlie walked around and sat nervously in some chairs (“we’re going back to Gong Gong and Po Po’s house,” we tried to assure him). He went to sit in the car with my parents as Jim and I talked to the director, watched a video about the center, and talked about why FCSN’s “village” model is so important to providing lifelong supports and services for kids with autism, Down’s syndrome, and special needs.

Jim and I felt privileged to meet autism mother Anna Wang, one of FCSN’s founds and mother of 16-year-old Lawrence. She smiled as she told us of raising funds for the center by, among other efforts, parents deliverying baotz (steamed filled buns—a treat my great-uncle Walt used to bring in pink bakery boxes) to Silicon Valley companies. It does not just “take a village” to raise a special needs child, she noted: “It takes the whole Bay Area!”

I am not sure where the village will be that Charlie will one day live in, but I know we need not only to start looking for it now. We need to start building it right now, today, as Anna Wang and the members of FCSN have begun to do—-and we need most of all to teach Charlie how to be one of the builders, too.

It will be his village, ultimately. And today I felt as if we were moving along to yet another stage on our Autismland journey with Charlie.