Pointy Things

 My new paring knife is missing and I need it for the roasted potatoes I am preparing for our Sunday supper. I shout to my son.

“Allen! Where is my paring knife? The one with the black and gray handle!” I specify the color because two other knives--both with plain black handles--have been heisted from the utensil drawer by Allen, who says they are both his and now reside in, respectively, his tool box and his shaving kit. 

“Was it a pointy thing?” asks Allen.

Yes. Pointy and sharp and metal. A knife. You know, a knife!

But Allen doesn’t know. The concept of specific names for things is difficult for him to grasp. He can easily recall what we name articles of clothing--socks, shoes, shirts, pants--but other things have much more fluid labels. 

“What’s that wooden thing we use on the leaves, Mom?” he will ask me.

“A rake?”

“Ah, yes. A rake. A rake.” He’ll repeat it several more times, trying to embed it in his brain that has too many synapses trying to make connections. He’ll probably ask me the name again when the leaves start to fall.

The rooms in our house are, to Allen, defined only by their contents. The living room is, “the place where we watch movies”, the kitchen is, “where we keep the refrigerator”, and the dining room is, currently, “where the computer is.” I can understand his confusion with the dining room which has been, in his lifetime, “the room with the big table,”, “the room where we do our homework,” and --in the last year of my husband’s life--”where Dad sleeps in the funny bed.”

Not only are the monikers changeable, the use of the items in our house are flexible. I see a dented tea kettle with a melted handle and Allen sees a steam engine used to power a mini-bike. I fold up a box from Amazon and place it in the trash and he shouts, “Mom! I can use that for my safety stand!” I do not know what his safety stand is and I don’t ask. I just hand over the cardboard.

If I want to throw something away, I wrap it in a black plastic bag and bury at the bottom of the trash bin.

“Great grandpa Waltersdorf would have loved you,” I tell my son. “He liked to collect things. He had a ball of string--little bits he’d saved and tied together--this big.” I spread my hands the width of a pumpkin.

“Where is it?” asks Allen. I’m sure his brain is already thinking of constructing an intricate spider web he can use to catch energy waves.

I shrug. “Gone long before you were born.” He looks sad, probably at the loss of the string and not a great grandparent he never knew.

Like those of many people who exist on the autism spectrum, Allen’s thought processes are often difficult to change. Supper must be at 5:30, Friday is when we order pizza, and market day is Thursday. The predictability helps him stay grounded in a world that changes too fast. Social skills are not his strength; we work hard to prepare for any situation involving people outside his immediate family, laying the foundation weeks in advance and social stories to help him with societal expectations. “I don’t know why that’s important,” he will say when I ask him to comb his unruly hair before his grandmother comes, “but I’ll do it.”

His rigidity in some areas is a dichotomy to his creativity. He sees objects and their potentials in a way no one else can. The tangled copper wire in the basement will become the spokes of a bike designed for outer space. The 2 by 4 on the porch with the pulley and rope will serve as the support for the elevator of his sister’s new house. I see none of these possibilities in these items,  but, as he points out to me, I’ve got about a hundred skeins of yarn stored in my closet that I envision as blankets and sweaters.

It is the need to create--to DO something--that helped Allen come to terms with his father’s death last year. While his brother and sister mourned in more conventional ways, the additional synapses in his neurotypical brain provided him with excess information. He needed to see for himself that his dad, no matter how much he wanted it, was not coming back. I think of it like reading an encyclopedia that has no index. Allen doesn’t know how to pare the input down.

I’ve come to understand my son and his different way of looking at life. I, too, can be flexible. 

“I don’t know where the gray and black pointy thing is,” he tells me, “but you can use mine.” He obligingly brings me the black handled pointy thing from his Dopp kit, used to clean his razors. Resigned, I wash it in hot water, pare my potatoes, and hand it back to him. He watches me carefully, making sure I do not slide it into the utensil drawer. 

“Thank you, “ I say.

“Anytime,” he says before he carries it upstairs. “You can use it anytime. Just ask.”

I smile as he leaves the room. On my way home from work tomorrow, I will stop at the Family Dollar Store and buy a new pointy thing, perhaps red. I will stow it among my baskets of wool and mohair and cotton on the shelves of my closet, a place Allen never goes. He, poor thing, cannot see the possibility of creations among the rainbow colors.

He sees only yarn.