Balloon Days, Part 3

Elijah's Cup
by Valerie Paradiz

(Page 3 of 3)

With tremendous effort, Einstein managed to graduate from the Polytechnical School, though his grades were mediocre. Following graduation, most of his classmates were hired for teaching positions at the school, but Einstein was not. He attempted to do some private tutoring at first, got fired for his casual teaching methods, then managed to wangle a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Zurich, where his unconventional dress and social habits were tolerated. He wore slippers and informal clothing to work. In fact, he always preferred wearing worn-in garments that were soft and melded to the shape of his body, probably because of tactile sensitivities.

The Swiss Patent Office, where Einstein often stayed after hours to work on his own projects, became the famous location of the development of his theory of relativity. Einstein said of himself that his scientific ideas first came to him as images, after which he had the hard task of putting them into words and understandable equations. "For example," writes Steven Pinker,

from imagining himself riding on a beam of light and looking back at a seemingly frozen clock tower, he developed the theory of special relativity — that time, length and mass vary with the relative motion of an event and an observer. From imagining himself inside a plummeting elevator and seemingly weightless, he developed the theory of general relativity — that gravity and acceleration are the same.

Temple Grandin compares her experience of visual thinking with the thought experiments that Einstein used in his development of physical ideas. Elijah's spatial sensitivity appears to be keen, yet he possesses few words to express the heightened experience of it. In the swimming pool at his father's house, I watch him through my goggles as he swims about and scans the voluminous underwater universe he's traveling through. His eyes are always wide open. Elijah even smiles underwater! When he comes up for a breath of air, I paddle over to him and take his buoyant little body into my arms.

"Elijah, why do you open your eyes in the water?"

He hesitates, thinking hard on the words he will summon forth. "It's... a... room," he answers brightly.

Had he been born in our contemporary era of learning disabilities and special education, young Einstein would most likely have been identified for an early intervention program similar to the one at Elijah's school. Einstein's delayed speech and echolalic tendencies would have called for intensive speech therapy. His outbursts would have made him a candidate for behavioral and social skills training, not to mention his seeming aloofness and insensitivity to others' feelings, which proved to be devastating for his relationships with his family. But this was not the paradigm of the 1890s when Einstein was a boy. What has remained, however, is the legacy of autistic invisibility.

For two years, the artifacts of Einstein's life swirled around me in my work for Dennis Overbye, begging one question: If Albert Einstein was autistic, did Elijah possess a social history that he might call his own? I wasn't equating my son with Einstein, or thinking, or hoping that one day Elijah might be deemed a genius. I just wanted to ponder this: If autism is a neurological culture unto itself, who might its historical role models be? Certainly, Elijah had living models. There was Sharron, for instance. There were Temple Grandin and Donna Williams. As a woman and a writer, I knew how crucial my own models were. I had Else Lasker-Schüler. I had Virginia Woolf. I had Mary Wollstonecraft. This made me ask, did Elijah have Einstein?

"I... want... a... baaa... looon," Elijah says, as we pass by Houst's one day on our way home from the playground.

"You want a balloon?" I'm surprised that he even noticed Houst's, and even more surprised that he's put together such a big sentence so quickly. "Sure. We have time."

I pull the car into the parking lot behind Houst's, still astounded at the effortlessness of the dialogue we just had. We haven't been to Houst's in months. We no longer need the balloon routine to get out of the house, although balloons themselves have taken up a large presence in our lives. Since those first trips to town, we have moved on to water balloons and their many possibilities. We throw them at one another outside in the meadow yelling, "Free shot! Free shot!" We freeze them overnight, then toss them off the deck onto the hard rocks below and listen to them shatter. We dump a pile of water balloons into the bathtub so Elijah can pop them underwater and watch them slowly shrink in his hand. We blow them up with air, draw funny faces on them, then deflate them and study the fine cartoon lines that are left. We paint them. We plaster them. We line them up in muffin tins. We put small bells inside them, blow them up, and shake them around like musical instruments.

We enter Houst's through the back door — which no longer confuses Elijah or makes him cry as it once did whenever our routine was altered — and walk down the long, faded linoleum aisle to the far end of the store where the balloon bins are.

"Oh! They've restocked! Look at all the choices!" I exclaim. "What color do you want?"

"Elijah... wants... flowww... errrrs." Though he's begun to use the pronoun "I" more often, Elijah occasionally falls back into third-personing himself. I see the balloon he's describing.

"Those aren't flowers; they're fireworks. Do you know what fireworks are?"

"Yes," he answers somewhat stiffly and formally. "Firrre... worrks."

"Fireworks look like flowers exploding in the sky. So you're kinda right."

"Elijah... wants... firrre... worrks."

"Yeah. Let's take the balloon to the counter."

Just as I turn to go to the checkout, Elijah stops me, pushing my hand toward the balloon bins.

"What... col... orrr... do... you... want?" he asks, attempting to use his "up-down speech." At school, his language therapist is working with him on asking questions that are inflected rather than monotone.

"You want me to choose a color?"

"Yes." He sounds like a small robot.

"Okay. Hmmm... Let's see... I'll take this black one."

Elijah stands there stiffly. I know his hesitation means he's working out a response to the words I just said, so I wait a few beats for him to pull them out. "That's... not... black."

"It's not?"

"It's... pur... ple."

"It's purple? Really?"

"Yes."

"Huh, it looks black to me."

"It's pur... ple."

"Would you like some helium in those balloons?" a girl working the cash register asks us. She must have replaced the checkout lady we used to know.

"Yeah. Thanks." The three of us walk over to the helium tank where I cover up Elijah's ears. The girl begins by filling up his balloon first. We watch the small fireworks expand into big bouquets. "Beautiful! They do look like flowers, Elijah."

"They're... firrre... worrrks." Elijah watches the girl tie a red ribbon to his balloon. I can feel his mind chewing on the fact that she didn't ask him which color ribbon he wanted, but he doesn't have the response time to speak out loud about it. She hands the balloon to him, then fits mine onto the spout of the tank.

"Wow!" she says. "I don't think I've ever seen a black balloon before."

"It's... pur... ple," Elijah corrects her.

"Purple?"

"Yes."

"Hmmm... maybe," she says halfheartedly and begins to fill it up. As the balloon grows, it transforms itself miraculously from black to deep purple.

"Elijah, you were right! It's purple!"

The girl nods enthusiastically in agreement. Elijah is visibly pleased with this inside knowledge. We pay the girl at the cash register.

"Thank you!" she says cheerfully.

"You're welcome," Elijah answers, and we walk out onto sunny Tinker Street, making our way to the field as a matter of course. It's summer, and our balloons are bobbing in the breeze above us.

"Hey, Elijah. You're going to be six years old very soon. Can you believe it?!"

"Yes."

We walk out to the center of the field, where, unannounced, Elijah's fireworks rise up into the sky.

"Let... go," he mechanically instructs me, tugging on my elbow.

"You want me to let go of mine too?"

"Yes."

"Okay, here goes." But I find myself hesitating. "You do it." I hold my balloon out to him.

"No," he says.

"No?"

"No."

"Okay, here goes!" I release the purple balloon and up it flies, joining Elijah's fireworks. "I've never done that before!" My heart is pounding. "Now I know what it's like!" Elijah is silent, holding my hand and watching our two balloons grow small together on their upward trajectories. "Thanks for showing me how to let go."

"You're... wel... come."

Copyright © 2002 by Valerie Paradiz

About the Author

Valerie Paradiz was born in Colorado and has lived and worked in Germany and Japan. For several years she has taught literature and writing at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. She lives with her son in Woodstock, New York.