LatinosUSA

I. OVERVIEW

I am beginning to document certain phases of my
life, looking back on 77 years of having the feeling
that something was wrong or out of place, but I was
not connected with the fortunate circumstances that
would have enabled me to obtain an expert diagnosis.
Thus far, my retrospect leads me to conclude that I
may have some form of High-Functioning Autism.

II. THE DREAM I STILL REMEMBER

I was a toddler, too young to enroll in school. We were
living in a triplex, and I was outside to enjoy the sunlight.
I chose to lie in the driveway, which was pleasantly warm,
and then a delivery van pulled in and stopped right on top
of me. I could feel vibrations from the van touching my
chest. And then I opened my eyes and beheld the sight of
my kitty cat curled up right on top of me, purring loudly,
while I lay in my bed safely inside. This I remember
clearly, even at 77, while countless other bits of data reside
in my mind’s version of a postal dead letter department.

III. PUBLIC SCHOOL

My second-grade teacher knew I tested well on the
regular coursework, and so she allowed me to sit on
the floor during instruction and create murals, which
were likened to the skill set of 6th-grade students, and
which won the honor of being displayed in the hallway
near the principal’s office. When I later started 7th grade
and could enroll in an Art class, I seized the opportunity.
But I was rudely disappointed that this class did not seek
to encourage students to practice their individual expression,
but rather had everyone sit under the same tree and render a
picture using charcoal. That was not my medium of choice,
and my picture turned out to be only a good example of
messes and smears.

IV. BOOKENDS

There were two events that served to bookend my public
school experience. Both involved blunt force trauma to
my head, with injury. The first was when I was about 4
years old, sitting outside playing with some bricks, when
one of them fell onto my head. My dad promptly took
me in for repairs and said it took 20 stitches to close the
wound. At that point in my life, medical science had no
way to measure the effect that a hard knock on the head
might have on the mental faculties of a toddler. The second
event happened when I was 18 years old, a recent high school
graduate, riding my motorcycle to visit a friend. I never saw
what hit me, but family, friends, and hospital staff later gave
me some details: hit by a car, knocked through the air, landed
on the street, suffered a contusion that left me comatose for
10 days, during which time my right thumb was reattached,
and they saved my left leg, using bone grafts from both hips to
entirely rebuild and align my ankle. For good measure, they
added a surgical pin. I was later released with a full-length cast
and some wooden crutches to use for one full year. After 6
months, the surgical pin was removed, and the cast replaced in
full. A dear friend signed me up for classes at the junior college
and I started attending, getting around on crutches. They let me
be in the marching band because they needed more low brass
players, even if I couldn’t march.

V. I STOOD IN THEIR SHADOWS

A high school classmate’s brother could just sit down at a
piano and start playing beautiful music without having any
musical notation to follow. And a different friend of mine
was very adept at sight-reading piano music. I fell between
those two extremes and used a generous helping of rote
repetition to cruise through the easiest, first 2 Bach two-part
inventions.

VI. THIS ONLY HAPPENED ONCE

In elementary school, I had the knack of knowing how to fold
an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper into 5 equal parts. The teacher
was almost too impressed by this parlor trick, since she lacked
the knack. I was reaping lots of credit for doing something no
teacher had ever taught me to do, which led me to wonder
how many other student accomplishments were celebrated by
teachers because they didn’t place any demands on the teacher.

VII. SHINING MY OWN LIGHT

I became rather obsessed with the fact that a lot of information
retained in my mind came to me either from documents recorded
by other people or from common hearsay, and not from my own
thinking, reasoning, or attention. In 1972, the year I graduated
UCLA, Harvard Professor Endel Tulving proposed the distinction
of semantic memory, a structured repository of knowledge about
the world, as opposed to episodic memory that one experiences
on one’s own. Unlike episodic memory, semantic memory is not
tied to a specific time or place. In this sense, my repository of
knowledge about the world is missing quite a few memory cells,
allowing me to revisit only a small fraction of what I had read or
was told. In contrast, I worked for an attorney who had a
photographic memory, and if presented a test that asked for
knowledge gained from reading, and she had done the reading,
she didn’t have to study for that test. My mind poses a very
different spectrum of memories, from the clear recall of a dream
I had when just a toddler, to the specific instructions for resetting
a wristwatch. Daily, I rely on mental crutches to help me navigate
my life’s memories.