He was the stay at home parent for me with my grandfather doubling for him when work or college didn't allow him to be there. Newly sighted at around 18 - 24 months, I loved to wallow about on the newspaper and press my face in close to study closely the paper I was pressing my face into as I rolled around. My parents thought I simply liked the texture, which I did, but they had no idea what else I was doing there. I meanwhile had no idea what I was doing with the pattern-matching shapes recognition meaning-giving game I was playing or that meant anything. It would be 3 more decades before anyone realized I could read and I would realize it meant anything. I was 11 before I started to figure out that the big individual shapes the muppets held up and sang about had anything to do with what for years I had already been doing with the newspaper (and then any books I got my hands on). At 7 years old I read the Communist Manifesto. At 11 I realized there was an alphabet.
Because we sat and watched Sesame Street every day and it was a good fun time for me, really a time to bond with my dad,
and because I believe and to my knowledge he just may have been the first person to get the idea to use sign with an autistic person (until or unless I learn otherwise its my unconfirmed suspicion)
he got me this Sesame Street Language book.
You can see the way its all taped up. I was hell on books, tore them up something awful. I wasn't especially interested in this book (which is really why there's been enough of it left intact for it to survive to exist as it has).
Even with the Lovaas thing that happened when I was 6 (which was pretty awful and taught to communicate to an extent out of extreme distress which is very often how I am to this day, leaving people to think I'm all 'pissed off' and really angry and miserable because that's pretty much what it can take to inspire/drive me to communicate)
I didn't do so great at signing. I was able to meaningfully/usefully sign about 7 signs by the time I was 13 and in the children's home. (Once there I started to do much better but I was and am still not a really great signer).
I'm not ready to talk about the years of trying to figure out when to sign toilet or getting in trouble because I MUST move and flashcards and squirt bottles and the way I was a genius at being a bad behaving kid)
Suffice it to say that there was no '6th grade' or making bracelets or spelling things out or anything like it of any sort for me. Before PECS and electronic communication devices there were things called "WULF" and "BLIS" boards (and I am guessing at the spelling because people didn't lean over and show the retard how its written when we're the retards who can't talk or toilet or spell, so we just heard them said)
at 21 I got my special diploma from a special school while living in a group home, and here is a picture of me with it on my graduation day. I could have gone to that school until I was 26 because schools for people like me let you do that, but I was sort of 'spontaneously graduated' so I could get right into the day programs and the sheltered workshop where I would be alternately attending and working for the next decade or so (whenever I was behaving well enough to get to live in group/afc etc homes that is, and not in the certain larger institution that enough excess bad behavior/non-functioning could get me returned to)
This has nothing to do with my education, but instead of my brother's ongoing education that went on throughout his adulthood until very recently (when for his efforts and abilities he got rather forcibly shipped off to Iraq.. long story I need to figure out how to tell without saying things I shouldn't)
The ability to discern and do unusual things regarding languages runs i our family it seems.
Being an extremely multilingual environment didn't' hurt one bit to be sure (mine is a rich heritage with lots of languages 'brought to the table' for us to be exposed to when I was little)
The govt liked my brother and the things he could with languages do enough to keep sending him to a very unique and elite sort of language school for lots of languages and other training.
The language school is called the Presidio of Monterrey.
Here it is on a shirt he got for me from there.
One theory is that somehow that inherited 'knack' may be what has left my textual ability to learn to read and then eventually enabled me to communicate as well as I do.
