You know, it’s funny. My precious boy Draco, I only get to see him 6 hours a week. And I try to make the best of those 6 hours. And because he’s autistic, I sometimes miss the mark. But music, this seems like a place where we connect. Although I don’t sing all that well, I remember my choir practices at Evergreen Park Presbyterian Chuch, where I was a pretty good boy soprano before I quit.
I got older later, and I became enthralled with the rock and roll singers of the ’60s and ’70s, the likes of Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger and John Lennon and a ton of others of their generation. But that stuff’s usually hard to sing a capella, so when he asks me to sing to him, and I ask him what he wants me to sing, and he just says “sing!” So I try to croak it out, and this is what I sing:
But then he wants more, so I try to sing this:
Then he asks me for more, so I sing this:
I can’t do the guitar parts, but I can sing the lyrics: “You’re my blue sky, you’re my sunny day. Lord you know it makes me high when you turn your love my way.”
You know I’ve actually had it suggested to me more than once that there’s something creepy about how much I love my children. Because after all I’m male, and there must be something wrong with that.
Bite me.
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Those are all awesome songs!
And they’re all impossible for a normal person to sing.
I dunno, “Three Little Birds” doesn’t sound so hard. It’s only got three chords…
Heh. “Three Little Birds” was actually hard for a while, because I kept convincing myself I must be missing some verse somewhere. But it’s so, so simple:
Don’t worry about a thing,
Cuz every little thing gonna be all right
Singin’ don’t worry about a thing
Cuz every little thing gonna be all right
Rise up this morning
Smile with the risin’ sun
Three little birds
Is by my doorstep
Singin’ sweet songs
A melody pure and true
Sayin’: This is my message to you-hoo-hoo
Singin’ don’t worry, about a thing….”
It’s nothing more than that. It seems like it must be complicated, but it’s not. It’s just a simple song of joy. I love Bob Marley, but “complicated” rarely describes his lyrics. The rhythm is sometimes complicated, and sometimes you’ve got to get past his complicated accent. Indeed, I remember reading that when Eric Clapton covered “I Shot The Sherrif,” he had a notoriously difficult time with it, because that Jamaican rhythm seemed very counter-intuitive to his rock’n'roll sensibilitities. Plus the tuning seemed difficulty on his guitar. But lyrically? Bob Marley is rarely difficult, once you understand the accent.
Now, singing him an Allman Brothers tune? That’s a challenge, as I have to figure out what to do with the (almost indispensible) guitar parts. But somehow I manage.
“I’m on my way to New Orleans this mornin’
Leavin’ out of Nashville Tennessee
They always havin’ a good time down on the bayou, Lord
Them Delta women think the world of me…”
I put him up on my shoulders, and we walk. Sometimes at least a mile or two. We walk and look at the sights, and he asks me to sing while he’s up there. Another of his favorites is when I sing “When I’m 64″ by the Beatles. But I rarely find that I go wrong when I sing someting out of the Great American Songbook.
So, for Draco, I keep trying to learn a new one for him.
He keeps asking me to sing to him. And he wants something more than the Barney and Sesame Street stuff. In fact he gets impatient if I sing him something like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” or any of those kid songs. No, he wants me to sing him something interesting. He actually gets impatient if I try to wuss out and sing something childish like “Bingo” or “This Old Man.” No, that’s not good enough, he wants something more interesting.
I find that the Great American Songbook rarely leads me astray. So I’m currently working on this one:
He has no patience at all for stereotypical kids’ songs. Sophisticate that he is, he constantly wants something more interesting. And I find that the Great American Songbook rarely leads me astray. He loves when I sing Sinatra, but I’m tryin to branch out and introduce him to some Dean Martin. Maybe Sammy Davis will be next.
How about spending some time going through mathemtically-based puzzles with Draco? I understand from some recent information posted online that autistic adults do far better at certain complicated tasks than their non-autistic counterparts.
On the other hand, does autism preclude Draco from developing expertise in writing music? Ludwig von Beethoven’s total deafness probably was an even greater barrier, in that he could not even hear performances of the music he had composed. I recall reading somewhere that after a performance of one of his great symphonies in Germany or Austria, the lead singer, Caroline Unger, walked over to Beethoven, who apparently had conducted the performance, and physically turned him around so that he could see if not hear the strong and sustained cheering for him manifested by the greatful audience.
Genius is where you find it. And who knows whether or not it might be hidden in the mind of a young autistic child.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold: You’re not far from correct. At all.
On many levels, he is behind normal child development. He is almost 5, yet he has trouble stringing everyday sentences together. Even short ones, like, “I am hungry Daddy” or “I need to go to the bathroom.”
Which most 4 year olds should be able to express.
Simple sentences still mostly elude him. He’s not retarded–far from it–but normal human interaction seems beyond his ken.
On the other hand, almost a year ago, his mother showed me something spectacular: she said “one thousand.”
He was just turned age 4, and he picked up some chalk and wrote it on the sidewalk: “1,000″
(Comma and everthing)
Then she said, “no, spell it.”
So he dutifully wrote out:
“O-N-E [space] T-H-O-U-S-A-N-D”
In clearly-written characters. With handwriting better than my own.
I repeat: with handwriting better than my own. He actually writes exquisitely. Not just better than me, but better than his mother and better than his brother who is about to turn 12.
Show me the average 4 year old who can do that, and I’ll eat my own head.
He still has trouble with sentences beyond 3 or 4 words. These are a challenge for him. But he asks me to sing for him, and he grows wearily impatient with me if I sing him a typical kid song. He really doesn’t want to hear “This old man, he played one!” or “Bingo was his name-o!” He listens for about 30 seconds, and then he gives me a dirty look.He doesn’t want to hear “The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the waterspout.” He gets annoyed and bored very quickly.
So then I sing him some Sinatra. And he likes that.
Make of it what you will. I only know that my 4 year old doesn’t want kid songs. He wants me to sing him something better. And I do. And he loves it.
There are lots of things out there about autistics being savants, and definitely some are. But I’ve seen no indication in any of the literature I’ve read, or in my own experience that autistics are any more likely to be savants than anyone else. In fact many autistic professionals fight this stereotype, which they blame primarily on the movie “Rain Man” which is not remotely typical of autistics.
My son (16 yr old high-functioning autistic) performs age-appropriately at school. He has demonstrated no savant skills that I’ve seen. He is no better or worse at math than his same age peers.
Because he is autistic I have had occasion to meet and spend time with other autistic children. I have yet to encounter any “savant” who is somehow amazing at math, engineering, physics, etc. They are kids with social interaction problems for the most part, who tend to be very focused on their own interests and their own desires, to the point that they tend to lose track of other people’s interests and desires.
I think I have said before that the professionals we work with have all said that our son is extremely high-funtioning autistic. In our experience he has been much closer to “normal” than most of the other kids, with one exception who is remarkably similar to him (and with whom I have spent a good bit of time with since we have frequently taken the two of them out to do things together).
My own experience with my own son is that he is extremely focused on his interests. When he wanted to be a web developer, he downloaded and installed WordPress in an afternoon on his own website. He is relentless in his pursuit of his goals.
For example, he has a fixation with streetlights. So we have bought him some streetlights. He also keeps a sharp eye out for any streetlights that might be thrown away or discarded. One day we happened to pass by a streetlight that had recently been repaired after a car hit it, but the repair people had just thrown the old broken streetlight behind a dumpster. We quickly picked it up and took it home. It was basically a broken mess.
Within a day he had found some parts online to replace the worst broken parts. He and I then took all the electrical parts and spent the evening rewiring them using one of his lights we had purchased earlier. Without any diagrams it was not easy to do, and we didn’t get it done that night.
When I got home from work the next day he had somehow found the correct wiring diagram online and had rewired it himself. But he didn’t want to turn it on without me there, so he waited until I looked it over. I couldn’t find anything wrong, so we plugged it in, and it worked immediately.
I’m not sure I could have done that in an afternoon.
But it’s not because he’s an electrical genius, it’s because he simply could not think about anything else until he had rewired the light.
This is fairly typical of autistics. Although the actual results vary, of course.
Oh, that streetlight is now mounted on the front of our house and when it’s on, it illuminates our entire 1/3 acre front yard.
We had a 3-year-old in our childcare that had a lot of issues relating to teachers and peers, but you could write down a number like 426 and he would immediately say loudly, “Four hundred and twenty-six!” Sounds similar to Draco.
It would not surprise me at all that he doesn’t like simplistic songs if he’s good at math. Math and music are closely linked; studying one usually gives you an advantage in the other.
I will say that I’m more likely to sing Gilbert & Sullivan to my son than kids’ songs. After all, I know it better. (Just finished a fundraiser where we did the one-act Trial By Jury— we played it as a modern celebrity circus, and it maps exquisitely well.)
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