Sunday morning with Aaron, Legos and a Death Song

You can just see the wheels turning. Sometimes, Big Wheels.

This morning Aaron and I built some things with Legos. He is good at Lego's. I know, a pretty much international symbol, right up there with the jigsaw puzzle piece, of the High-functioning ASD aspects of him. But he is good at Lego's. And puzzles, and seeing how physical things work, and recognizing subtle patterns in occurrences or systems, and ...you get the idea.

I started building a square based white structure, a library I thought. He came over and started telling me about how we should make it a block, like the ones in Minecraft. I didn't know he had ever seen Minecraft, which I hadn't. X-Box at a friend's house. Of course.

I was struck then by that glimmer of the amount of stuff he has picked up this summer spending time with neighborhood friends. He is starting to have more things in common with the other kids near his age. Starting to be more accepted among a few school/neighborhood kids. I hope that lasts.

This is a big deal, considering his often general clueless-ness regarding a few key aspects of social interactions. Some of his friends seem to have learned over the last few years of on again, off again friendships with him that at certain times he's going to be some way that doesn't get it with them. Someway they don't understand. Boundaries and a frequently weak ability to empathize or care about what others want or don't want are blind-spots for him. That and the meltdowns that happen now and then.

We are building the Minecraft block. It is going to be all kinds of colors now that we ran out of white. We're doing it in even levels of different colors as much as we can. 

We were taking a break from it when he started keening a fairly high pitched sliding note over and over. Repetition of words, phrases, or tones is another one of his things. It's like auditory stimming.

I asked where that sound came from and he said it was a song about somebody who died. 

Um, OK. 

When your eight year old boy starts making up an Indian sounding Death Song out of the blue -  you kinda perk up your ears at full attention, dontcha?

"Oh, what does that come from?" I asked. "WelllllllL", he said, "There was this writer named Dr. Seuss, and he was my most-most favorite best writer, and he was really great, and he died - so this is my song about him dieing". 

*BLINK*


It was one of THOSE moments. One where both his mom and I Flashed Big, little Ping!s going off in our brains. This was to be noted, thought about, filed away in it's own little brain crease, and probably recalled many years from now. 

I guess this post is to make sure of that. Slick, how that works, innit? #amwriting, Ya gotta love it.

Just the way he said it, matter of factly with no particular negative emotions displayed, as though singing a very primal sounding Death Song to his favorite author was just obviously a thing to do, that was a *thing*.

And Presto! He has tapped into a tradition of humans to sing the Death Song in tribute to their honored dead for what, thousands upon thousands of years?  

Living with this sometimes subtly, sometimes spectacularly different young fellow is like that. 

Just like that.

Ping!

Music this am - not necessarily directly related to the post - 
Zoe Keating, one of my favorite Avant Cellists, plays ESCAPE ARTIST