The Words In Your Head

Dearest Christopher,

In my early years of reading about autism, studying everything I could get my hands on, and interrogating your doctor and speech therapist, I learned a great many things. Dad and I even took a ninety-hour course on the workings of the brain. I came away realizing one thing above all:

It’s a wonder anybody’s brain and body can function normally.

The workings of the brain are a miracle.

Among the many things we learned about were savant skills, or splinter skills, as they are sometimes called in the world of autism. Some autistic children seemed to possess remarkable gifts of math, art, memory or music. We wondered whether we would ever see anything like that in you.

We eventually did. The first hint came from music.

Once, on a road trip, I played a Bach piece I had downloaded, hoping the music would help soothe the long drive for you. It was intricate and beautiful, the kind of piece I simply enjoyed listening to without ever attempting to remember it.

A few minutes later, Daddy and I heard you quietly humming in the back seat. You gazed out the window at the blur of New Mexico landscape, as your voice lilted through movement after movement of the entire piece!

We looked at one another in amazement. Your musical memory was unlike anything the rest of us possessed.

As the years passed, your memory continued to surprise us.

When you were about eleven, I asked all the children to keep journals. As usual, yours turned out rather differently.

You had been fascinated by weather ever since you could talk. Wind, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes—anything powerful completely filled your thoughts and imagination. Instead of writing about your day, you began making an elaborate weather handbook.

I still can picture you sitting at the dining room table, your sketchbook spread open, a handful of crayons rolling around beside your pencil as you bent over yet another page—on weather! The rest of us would pass by from time to time just to see what you were working on next.

Page after page appeared: fresh breezes, gales, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, each one carefully and beautifully illustrated and described.

Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I pulled several weather books from the shelf and began checking your work.

“Christopher,” I thought, “you’re a little plagiarist!” Except you had never copied anything. Many of your descriptions were nearly word for word, even down to the punctuation, but they came from a variety of books you’d read months, perhaps years, before.

“Honey,” I finally called to Daddy, “I think Christopher may have some sort of photographic memory.”

We never completely solved that mystery. We simply learned to accept it, because the ability seemed to appear in some places but not all.

One spring afternoon, I saw it again. The Godsey’s, your second cousins and my first cousins, came over for one of our family writing workshops. We gathered beneath the cedar trees with the pungent scent of cedar mingling with the rich smell of damp spring earth. A gentle breeze stirred the branches overhead while you and Nicolas carried the big whiteboard out into the yard.

It was poetry day, so I copied a Robert Frost poem onto the board, and together we studied its rhythm and rhyme before trying our hand at writing something similar. We laughed over awkward meters and rather cheesy rhymes until finally I wrote a simpler poem on the board for everyone to imitate.

When your turn to read came, you read a lovely poem that left us all speechless.

“Wow, Christopher,” I said. “Did you really write that yourself?”

You looked at me with a furrow under your shock of dark hair.

“Well… I hope I did it right. But once I read this poem in a book, and it matches that.” You pointed at the poem on the board with your weathered pencil.

“What book?”

You couldn’t remember.

“One of the ones on the bookshelf.”

It followed the pattern perfectly.

“That’s wonderful,” I smiled, “but this time you were supposed to write one out of your own head.”

You threw back your head and laughed.

“I don’t have words like that in my head.”

We all laughed with you, but the reality was that you did. While the words most of us read flutter away like summer moths, somehow those beautiful lines had been engrave into your mysterious memory and waited there until this day when they were needed.

Christopher, though you have fought battles that most of us will never face, God has also entrusted you with gifts that most of us will never possess.

The same God who tucked melodies safely into your memory and preserved the words of poets you scarcely remembered reading also knew why He entrusted those gifts to you.

Cherish them, and use your music to glorify Him. Use your memory to bless His children.

Every gift He gives is meant to become a doorway through which someone else discovers His love.

Love,
Mom