The Spark

by Kristine Barnett

  Similarly, while the other mothers we knew were rolling their eyes at the language their kids used, I practically jumped with pride the night Jake told me the movie he’d seen that afternoon was “wack.” I tried not to make a big deal out of it, but as he was clearing the table, I couldn’t help grinning at Mike. It was his very first piece of slang.

  Sometimes Jake and his buddies would play chess together, but mostly they watched movies or battled with their light sabers and ate every chip in the house. When the Star Wars prequels came out, Jake memorized every line. But for the first time, he wasn’t the only one. Nearly every boy his age could recite those movies by heart. I was so happy to see him hanging out with his friends, I kept the chips and videogames coming, and I didn’t fuss too much when someone took out one of the living room lamps in their pursuit of Darth Maul. Sometimes I’d have to give Jake a little nudge: “Hey—maybe it’s time to stop talking about math now?” But in general, he adapted incredibly well, and those kids became real friends.

  By now, the daycare was completely integrated into our lives. As before, projects often spilled over from the garage into the house. Most of the time, the project was so much fun that everyone got involved. For instance, we spent two weeks creating a wall-sized mural out of thousands of jelly beans in every color you could possibly imagine. It was hard work! But we were all together, singing songs and telling stories, and it was beautiful when it was done. The immense size of it gave the children a real sense of accomplishment. I’m also pretty sure that we ate as many jelly beans as we glued onto the wall.

  Around that time, a new mom came to see me. She was going back to work the next week. Her baby was at that age where separation anxiety kicks in, and it seemed that she was even more upset about leaving her baby than the baby was to be left. I completely understood, of course. I’d been there myself. So I went to sleep thinking, What can we do to make this little girl’s first day as special as possible?

  The next day, I put the kids in the daycare to work—all twelve of them, including Ethan, and when they got home from school, Wesley and Jake, too. Together we made huge butterflies out of strips of crepe paper, in every color they had at the party store. Then we glued them together, and I had Mike hang them from a frame attached to the ceiling. “Go big or go home,” he teased me, not for the first time. The effect of all of the butterflies together, covering the entire ceiling and fluttering in the breeze from an open window, was breathtaking.

  The kids I took care of were doing activities and projects that others would have considered wildly out-of-bounds for children their age. But I never understood why you would hold a child back. If they could do something, and they wanted to, why wouldn’t you let them? Every day, I was astounded by their native strengths. I could never be an electronics whiz like Elliott or artistic like Claire.

  My grandparents had always given my sister and me little jobs to do, even when we were tiny. We loved organizing the art supplies in the Sunday school, for instance—a real job, and we did it as soon as we could walk. Stephanie and I were put in charge of organizing the tea service at church, too. Each tray needed to be washed and polished, then set with a full creamer, a sugar bowl, and a small glass full of polished spoons. Nobody ever worried about us breaking a glass, and I don’t remember that we ever did.

  We learned at my grandmother’s knee to cut ordinary paper into intricate pieces of art before most kids were allowed to handle safety scissors. We learned how to sew our own clothes as soon as we were old enough to hold a needle. My grandmother’s precise stitches were barely bigger than the weft of the strong cotton fabric she sewed, a sign of her experience. One of my earliest memories is of hiding underneath the big quilting frame my grandmother would set up in the front room whenever someone announced an engagement or a baby on the way. I was free to play under the frame after I had proudly contributed my own carefully embroidered square to the quilt. I was three.

  I’d learned to bake from my grandmother as well, and not from a recipe, but by feel. Stephanie and I could tell when the bread had risen enough by the strands of gluten that pulled away from the bowl. We knew when to check cookies for doneness by the smell. This wasn’t when we were teenagers, but little girls, still using a stool to reach the countertop.

  Perhaps it came naturally to me to give the kids in the daycare, and my own children, a lot more responsibility than other people might have. For example, as a toddler Ethan loved pasta. He’d always been interested in cooking and baking, so I bought him an inexpensive hand-cranked pasta maker. The first few batches he made were not great, but he stuck with it. After a month, four-year-old Ethan’s linguine was delicious.

  Noah loved math, so I built him an abacus by stringing giant beads onto wooden dowels, and he taught himself to multiply. Claire loved to sew, so she made little animal-shaped pillows out of felt, and we took them to the children’s hospital as gifts for the patients. In my experience, independence and the opportunity to be creative never went to waste if the children were allowed to do what they loved.

  Who Am I?

  “I hope next year I’ll be able to learn.”

  That was Jake’s response to his second-grade teacher when she asked him what he was most looking forward to in third grade. Jake was starving for knowledge, craving it, longing for it, in a way that was a little frightening at times.

  Michael and I were no longer surprised by the depth and breadth of his interests, by his endless memory, or by his ability to see patterns and connect them. But we were finding it hard to keep up. We supported his voracious appetite as best as we could with our trips to Barnes & Noble and lots of time on the Internet, but it was never quite enough.

  Mike said it best: Jake was like Pac-Man. If there was something in front of him he could learn, he’d gobble it up and be energized by it. When he hit a wall, he’d just reverse course and find something else to learn. Heather, who helped me with the daycare, was in her sophomore year of college when Jake was in third grade. It was Heather who rediscovered Jake’s facility for languages, hints of which Michael and I had seen when he’d taught himself Japanese from DVDs as a baby. She had to take a Spanish class to satisfy her language requirements. One night she forgot her Spanish-to-English dictionary at our house, and the next day she discovered that Jake had taught himself a bunch of Spanish words.

  Soon after, she brought in a beginner’s textbook for him, because she was curious to see what he’d do. Two weeks later, he could conjugate verbs, and he did the same thing with Chinese when she brought him a starter book she’d found in a secondhand shop down by the college. I have to confess, I didn’t encourage Jake to actively pursue other languages. I was more interested in helping him to become conversational in English. When he was chattering away in Spanish, I couldn’t understand a word he said. English was quite enough for me.

  Heather worked for me on and off for a long time, so she knew Jake well. She told him once, “Someday you’re going to win a big award, and your mom is going to make so much noise celebrating that she’s going to get you all kicked out of the restaurant.” Jake found the idea of me whooping it up in a fancy restaurant incredibly funny, so it became a running joke between them. When Heather arrived for work, she’d always ask, “Hey, Jake, has your mom gotten you kicked out of that restaurant yet?”

  In some ways, Heather was more his peer than the kids in his third-grade class. When she was studying for her exams, Jake would curl up with her and study, too. When I asked if he was a distraction, she’d say, “No, he’s helping!”

  Watching them together, I could see that he was. “Don’t forget this,” he’d remind her, his little finger pointing to a fact on a chart.

  “He’d do better on this final than most of the kids who are going to take it,” Heather told me one night as she was putting on her coat to leave.

  The fascinating thing was what he did with the information he memorized—the way he assimilated, integrated, and manipulated it, as well as the conclusions h
e drew. For instance, he had become obsessed with geology and would talk endlessly about plate tectonics, fault lines, geothermal vents, earthquakes, and volcanic islands. The interest itself may have been narrow, but the way he implemented it was not.

  One Sunday afternoon when he was in third grade, he took over the dining room table, covering every inch of it with textbooks, tidily lined up edge to edge. When it was time to clear the table for dinner, Mike called me over in a hushed voice. One enormous book was open to a diagram of the Wabash Valley Fault, the seismic zone that runs through Indiana, and next to that was a 3-D image of the fault. Another open book showed a reconstruction of a hunting camp used by the Clovis culture, the nomadic Paleo-Indians who occupied the area during the prehistoric period. Yet another showed an illustration of a Native American guiding a French explorer through Indiana in the early 1700s. A fourth was open to a geographical and statistical map of the state dating back to 1812. And a topographic map drawn by the U.S. Army in the 1940s sat neatly next to an up-to-date ASTER satellite image of the state.

  In a notebook, Jake had calculated the precise longitude and latitude of our house, as well as the corresponding celestial coordinate system. Nearby, there was a book of star maps, open to the constellations that would be most visible from central Indiana that evening.

  It was astonishing: a cross section of our place and time, a multi-layered, historical snapshot, spanning from prehistory to the present, and from the earth’s very core to the farthest reaches of the solar system. I didn’t doubt for a second that not only had Jake memorized every fact that I could see in those open books, but that he was also working on a synthesis of what he’d learned, a woven tapestry that would bring together all those random details from multiple disciplines, a theory much more than the sum of its parts. It gave us a peek into the complicated matrix that made up the beautiful universe of Jake’s mind.

  Michael and I stood together, taking it all in. Then I had to yell down to the basement to get him to come upstairs and put all this stuff away so I’d have someplace to put the lasagna. Sometimes I think that if I’d stopped to totally comprehend what I was seeing, it would have been harder to be a mom to him. “It’s just Jake,” Michael and I would say to each other. We never stopped to think about how truly beyond belief his capabilities were at that time, and I think that was probably a good thing.

  I don’t really know when Jake first became aware of himself as a prodigy, but eventually he came to understand how different he was. He always liked to lie under the trees in our backyard. On occasion, we’d hear him giggle and say, “Four thousand five hundred ninety-six,” or some other large number. That was the number of leaves on the tree. It wasn’t that he was counting the leaves, at least not one by one, the way you or I would. The number was just obvious to him. If one came wafting down, he’d adjust the total: “Four thousand five hundred ninety-five.” When Jake started to realize how unusual these behaviors were, he became a little more self-conscious about them. “Okay, that was kind of two hundred forty-six toothpicks,” he’d say with a chuckle, referring to the iconic scene in the movie Rain Man.

  I hated his self-consciousness, not wanting him to feel embarrassed about the gifts that made him special. But third grade was hard. At age eight, boys tend to group together by their favorite sport. You have the baseball boys, the football crew, and the soccer kids. Jake still had a lot of physical delays. He was a slow, uncoordinated runner, and swimming was a struggle. So when the school sent the sports sign-up sheet home, he didn’t put his name down for any of them.

  He did sign up for the chess club, a group that met for matches before school. Most of the players were still learning how the pieces moved, so Jake didn’t have a lot of serious competition. He kept things interesting for himself by sacrificing a number of his important pieces—his queen, one of his bishops, and five of his pawns—early in each game, leaving himself with only weaker pieces with which to defend his king. None of the children ever noticed that this was deliberate, even though he gave up the same pieces every time. While the other kids were learning the game, Jake was honing important social skills, such as how to be patient while someone else takes a turn and how to give and take in relationships.

  He got a lot out of the friendships he made with kids at school and in the neighborhood, but he was also socially aware enough to know that he was somehow different from his friends and from all the other kids in his class. After school, the other kids wanted to shoot baskets or watch sports on TV. Jake did those things, too, but he really wanted to spend time working on advanced math or updating his political map of the United States.

  There was a fundamental part of Jake that he couldn’t share with the other boys. Gerrymandering or soil chemistry or whatever his preoccupation was that week generally didn’t interest them, and his passions only underscored the difference between him and them. By that time, Jake found it easier to slow himself down, to sit there and pretend that it took him twenty minutes to get through a times-table worksheet, like it did for everyone else. Getting along socially meant that Jake had to keep part of himself—a big part—a secret.

  One of the prodigy experts we talked to pointed out that when someone with Jake’s IQ concentrates on doing anything, even if it’s just acting like an ordinary third grader, he’s going to knock the ball out of the park. Yet the double life he was leading also caused him to have a kind of identity crisis. He had to find out who he was, because he didn’t really know.

  Jake and I spent a lot of time online looking at videos of autistic savants and child prodigies. Many of the child prodigies on YouTube are musical, which had the unexpected side benefit of inspiring Jake to play music. Jake would listen to a few minutes of a piece of classical music, press Pause, sit down at the piano, and instantly play what he’d just heard, more or less perfectly. This was amazing to watch, and it seemed to be relaxing for him. Jake has never been a morning person, but playing the piano for a few minutes in the morning became one of his favorite ways to wake up.

  We found videos of Kim Peek, the autistic megasavant on whom Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie Rain Man was based. Peek was known for calendar calculation, among other things. He could tell you, for instance, not only the date of Winston Churchill’s birth but also on which day of the week Churchill was born, based on the year of his birth.

  “Really? That’s a big deal? I can do that,” Jake said, as we watched the video clip.

  “You can?” How could I not have known about this? Admittedly, a skill like that doesn’t generally come up in conversation.

  “So what day of the week was I born?” I asked.

  “In 1974, April seventeenth was a Wednesday,” he said, without looking away from the screen.

  He was, of course, right.

  I also had no idea how good his visual memory was until we saw another documentary online about the artist Stephen Wiltshire. Wiltshire is an autistic savant who has been called “the Human Camera” for his ability to draw a nearly perfect rendition of a landscape he’s seen only once. For the documentary we saw, the filmmakers hired a helicopter to fly him over Rome. After a single aerial pass, Wiltshire was able to draw the city, down to the most minute architectural details, such as the number of columns in the Pantheon.

  “That’s how I see, too,” Jake said, surprised that there was someone else out there who saw the world the way he did, and also by the fact that everyone couldn’t accurately remember how many windows there were in a skyscraper they’d seen only once. Jake didn’t have Wiltshire’s artistic ability, but he, too, could remember accurately how many cars there’d been in the Best Buy parking lot we’d passed at fifty-five miles an hour, and how many of them had been silver, along with hundreds of other minute details.

  Seeing other autistic savants on YouTube was a relief for Jake, but it wasn’t a solution to the alienation he felt in his everyday life. In some ways, knowing that other savants and prodigies were out there actually intensified Jake’s feel
ings of loneliness.

  There’s a big difference between knowing you’re not alone because you’ve watched someone on YouTube and feeling like you’re not alone because you have someone to talk to as an equal. Jake could tell me all about his interests, but we weren’t having a conversation. I wasn’t suddenly going to have an insight about pyroclastic flows that would engage him. The best I could do was listen and ask questions, and at a certain point that’s not enough.

  At Jake’s urging, I got in touch with Dr. Darold Treffert, Kim Peek’s doctor, and one of the world’s leading experts on autistic savants. At that time, Dr. Treffert’s website featured profiles of a number of savants, and Jake felt an immediate sense of connection. For someone who had been asking the questions “Where do I fit in?” and “Where do I belong?” Dr. Treffert’s site seemed heaven-sent. So I called.

  In the world of autism, it can take a year to get in touch with an expert in your state. I was shocked to find that Dr. Treffert answered his own phone. I told him about my unusual son, and he was immediately interested. After we’d talked for a while, he made a comment that I think about almost every day. He said, “Wait and see. Your son will surprise you.”

  At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. “Oh, he already surprises me plenty,” I said, laughing. “He surprises me every day.”

  It was true. After all, I hadn’t had the slightest idea that he could do calendar calculation, had I? But in the years since that conversation, I’ve come to realize how truly wise that prediction was. Dr. Treffert knew that we’d only seen the very tip of the iceberg. He understood that Jake’s capabilities would increase exponentially as he got older and that they would expand past anything we could have predicted.