Say That Again
I want to start with what Noah was wearing.
He had chosen the dinosaur shirt himself that morning, which he always did for family events because he believed, in the way that eight-year-olds believe things, that the right clothing communicated something important about you. The dinosaur shirt was navy blue with a Triceratops on the chest, and he had explained to me once that Triceratops were actually the misunderstood ones: everyone talked about T. Rex but Triceratops had three horns and a frill and were actually quite formidable if you thought about it carefully.
I think about that sometimes now.
He wore the shirt to my father’s seventy-first birthday picnic because it was his best shirt and he wanted to make a good impression. He had reminded me three times on the drive over to park in the driveway instead of on the street because the walk from the street went past the section of the yard where Mrs. Patterson’s dog sometimes got through the fence, and he was not afraid of dogs, he explained, he just preferred to have some warning.
He had prepared for the picnic the way he prepared for everything: systematically, carefully, with a plan.
He is a child who thinks through how things will go and what he can do to make them go well. His therapist, a warm and precise woman named Dr. Anita Ramos, describes this as advanced situational awareness combined with a strong preference for predictable environments, and she says it will be one of his most significant strengths when he is older, and I believe her, but on the afternoon of my father’s picnic it manifested as a seven-year-old sitting carefully on a wooden bench because he had noticed ants in the grass and had decided the bench was the safer option.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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