I spend a lot of each day with Jacob, my autistic godson, trying to sort the pieces, and construct a puzzle that makes any kind of sense.  The clues, all of them spoken in movement because he has no language, are fragmentary, random, slippery, unreliable.  He is speaking in a code made up of beginnings that do not so much end as evaporate, endings that are not final, and links that form no chain.

This is a dance for which I have no program.  I often feel that I have arrived well into the performance, and have no idea of the plot or the players.

Some pieces reappear.  Touch:  he loves pressure on his back and legs and just a second later the delicate glimmering flickers of his fingers with mine.  There are the repetitions:  little rituals too short to hang your hat on – pulling everything from the shelves in a clatter or diving into a corner like a seal into the sea.

Outside, there is climbing, hanging, swinging – his solitary pleasures as he is swift and agile – a sloth, a bird, a monkey.  We cannot follow except with eyes.  On the ground, he runs – with us, without us – it is the same to him.

And yet, we all – parents, caregivers, godmothers, therapists – continue to stare at the pieces, turn them over, move them around, trying to make a picture that we can read, a landscape of this boy.  We are improvising – first our answers, and then our questions too.  The first and only known is his great heart, and ours, and ours.