The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (31 page)

Narnie and I both laughed at the image of Jake heading across campus, memorizing four hundred digits of pi, while dragging a rolling suitcase with one hand and eating a chicken sandwich with the other.

The next day, we ran into Narnie in the driveway. “Hey, Jake, how’s the pi?” she asked.

“Good. I haven’t memorized any more, though. Mom says it’s a waste of time.”

I had, because it was. Jake could keep going and going until the end of time—but why? The synesthetic autistic savant Daniel Tammet memorized pi out to fifty thousand digits and recited it to raise money for an autism charity, which was a wonderful thing. (Ultimately, the recitation took him more than five hours. He used chocolate to get through it. That, at least, I could relate to.) But even Daniel Tammet talked more in his book about the challenges of managing his social anxiety and the physical difficulties of the recitation than any particular intellectual challenge.

Narnie came right back at Jake, with the world’s most innocent look. “What?” she said. “No, silly. I was talking about cherry pie.”

Jake cracked up, shaking his head as he got into the car. There’s no chance of him getting a fat head as long as Narnie’s around.

I laughed, too, but something was nagging at me. Halfway down to the university, I looked at Jake in the backseat in my rearview mirror. He was playing Angry Birds on his iPad.

“Hey, Jake,” I said. “Why did you stop memorizing pi at forty digits?”

“I didn’t stop at forty. I stopped at two hundred.”

“But before. Why did you stop at forty?”

“It was forty including the three. Thirty-nine decimal digits, actually.”

“Okay, but why did you stop there?”

“Because with thirty-nine decimal places, you can estimate the circumference of the observable universe down to a hydrogen atom. I figured that was all I’d ever really need.”

O
ne of the first things I noticed about the Honors College was Jane’s expectation that her students become meaningful citizens of the world. They are actively expected to devote time and service to helping others.

Jake’s own form of service began with tutoring in the math lab, which he began doing as soon as he got to campus. The kids he tutors usually make one joke about his age and then get down to the nitty-gritty of whatever it is they don’t understand. That talent for teaching I first saw in our living room has blossomed, something you can see every time he helps someone understand a new concept and the light of comprehension dawns.

When I see Jake, I can’t help thinking about Grandpa John. Math and science are so electrically charged for him, so vibrant and beautiful, that he wants everyone to be as passionate about them as he is. When one of his most labor-intensive tutoring students (a fairly desperate case, by her own admission) passed Calculus II, she and Jake both cried with relief. He also seems to have inherited my grandfather’s patience. “You’ll get it; take your time,” he encourages the kids he tutors. And then he just sits back and watches, munching away on some Crunchy Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, while they work their way through a new problem. He also runs study groups, some of which are standing room only. Again like my grandfather, he has a unique gift for creating communities of people who can support one another. Nobody knows better than he does that you can’t do it alone.

Jane has pointed out that Jake’s facility at tutoring gives the rest of
us a window onto how he sees math. If one approach to solving a problem doesn’t seem to be working for the student he’s tutoring, he’ll come up with another way, and another, and another, until one finally clicks. His dexterity is evident. Whereas even someone quite gifted in math can usually only grind out one or two ways at most to arrive at the right solution to a problem, for Jake all the many different roads one might take to get there pop up instantly. Watching him teach, you can see that he’s having fun. In return, the students he tutors have taught him things such as eating peanut butter with a spoon straight from the jar. (Thanks, guys.)

I’ll confess that when we were thinking about college, it didn’t occur to us that Jake would make real friends with the kids there. But Jane expects all the kids in the Honors College to form a community and to nurture one another both academically and emotionally, and Jake has become an important part of that. The age difference isn’t as pronounced as we expected. There’s a “little brother” quality about the way the other kids treat him that I find very endearing, and he enjoys it, too. As the eldest in our family, it’s a new experience for him. Jane told me recently about walking into the kitchen and overhearing a group of kids talking about Jake. They’d figured out that he wouldn’t have his driver’s license before graduation and were squabbling over who’d get to drive him to the ceremony.

Just as Jane intended, interacting with students from many different disciplines may be reaping benefits for my math- and physics-obsessed boy. A young literature student from the Honors College told him about Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful young adult novel
A Wrinkle in Time
and even showed him how to find it in the library and check it out. Whether she can get him to actually read it remains to be seen. Like many people with autism, Jake finds it difficult to read fiction. He says that for him, reading a made-up story is like converting a Microsoft Word document into an Excel spreadsheet.

Most important for me, at the Honors College we have seen Jake get in touch with his sense of humor. I have three boys and run a daycare, and if I didn’t have a sense of humor, I wouldn’t make it to lunchtime. I don’t think Jimmy Fallon’s writers have anything to worry
about from these guys unless there’s an urgent call for math jokes. But it warms my heart to see one of Jake’s new friends swipe the baseball cap off his head and turn it the “wrong” way—which for Jake means facing front—while the two of them laugh about why the chicken crossed the Möbius strip. (To get to the same side, of course.)

The biggest change is that Jake is finally capable of real conversation. Now, when I ask him how his day went, he doesn’t just give me a blow-by-blow account of his schedule. Instead, he tells me about the practical joke his friend Nathaniel pulled on his friend Tracy, or what his buddy Owen did when he flunked the calculus pop quiz and what Owen thinks his parents will do when they find out. He asks me about the daycare and tells me dumb blonde jokes because he knows they’ll make me roll my eyes. Because Jake is finally part of a back-and-forth discussion at school, he and I are finally having the conversation I always hoped we would.

His brothers benefit, too. One afternoon we turned on the TV to find that one station was broadcasting live from the Mecum car auction. For once, Wesley stood still, and I could almost hear the celestial music. Here were all the cars he’d ever dreamed of: Corvettes, Camaros, collectibles such as the car from
Knight Rider
, and of course a selection of his beloved Maseratis. As soon as we heard that the auction was taking place in Indianapolis, we were out the door. The boys tied their shoes in the backseat.

To get in, we had to register as “bidders.” Pretty funny, given that we had only $5,200 in the bank. But the kids understood that we wouldn’t be able to buy anything; we were there just to look. All three of them lit up with excitement once we got inside. Even I had to admit it was an amazing spectacle. The auction featured every car I’d ever heard of and a lot I hadn’t. Wes took the lead, walking around each car and looking at every detail, down to the hubcaps. Many of the entrants even let him look under the hood. The whole time, Jake dug into his encyclopedic memory, unearthing fact after fact about the cars.

I never thought I’d find myself crying at a car auction, but I found it deeply moving to see my three boys walk off, heads together, talking
excitedly about what they were seeing. In particular, it seemed as if Jake and Wes had finally found common ground.

We went back the next day, and the next. Finally, the auctioneer got down to the last cars on the lot. We watched an Oldsmobile sell for $3,000 and a Volkswagen go for $2,500. Next, a blue-gray Nissan Z, barely old enough to be a classic, sputtered across the red-carpeted floor. The bidding started at $500 and climbed in hundred-dollar increments up to $1,000. I snuck a glance at Wesley. He was head over heels in love. Catching Mike’s eye, I knew he’d seen it, too.

At $1,500, the auctioneer got ready to call it: “Once … twice …” Without a word, Mike hoisted Wesley up onto his shoulders and helped him hold up our bidding card. The gavel came down, and the Nissan was ours. Mike and I grinned at each other. In true “muchness” fashion, we had just bought our middle son a car.

Were we out of our minds? Probably. All the dealers in the audience turned to smile at the little boy on his dad’s shoulders. I’m sure every one of them remembered what it felt like to fall in love with a car for the first time, although I’d bet that very few of them knew what it felt like to get it! But all Wes cared about was what Jake thought, and Jake was beaming, ear to ear. He held Wes’s hand the whole time we were doing the paperwork.

When we got home, Wesley ran upstairs and dumped out his coin collection. “What’re you doing?” I asked, stopping at the door of his room.

“Looking for my lucky penny,” he said, rooting through the change.

I smiled. My grandfather always had a shiny quarter for each of his thirteen grandchildren, and he always alerted us to lucky pennies lying on the ground. (I never suspected anything at the time, but now that I think about it, what
were
all those pennies doing out there in the Indiana countryside?) Whenever we passed a fountain, Grandpa John would give us a penny to toss in, reminding us to make a wish.

I’d always offered my own children pennies to toss. Jake had never been interested, and Ethan didn’t seem to care much either. But right from the start, Wesley had taken this wishing business very seriously. There was a fountain in the hospital where he’d go for therapy as a
very little boy, and he’d often stand in front of it, carefully formulating his wish before tossing in the coin. Even when he got older, whenever we passed a fountain I’d slip him a coin to toss in.

Digging through the coins on his bedroom floor, Wes found his lucky penny. He polished it, looked at it, and then polished it again. “I can’t believe it, Mom. Today is the day my wish came true!”

Thinking that he would have been wishing for a fast car, I couldn’t stop myself from teasing him a little. “Really?” I said. “You wished for a Nissan Z?”

He looked confused for a moment, then shook his head.

“No, I never wished for a Nissan. I never wished for a car at all. The only thing I ever wished for was that Jake would play cars with me.”

M
ichael put his arm around me, and the two of us looked out a small interior window on the second floor of Jacob’s Place. Below us was the gym, where forty autistic kids and their families were playing and hanging out.

“Does it feel the way you thought it would?” I asked him.

“Better.”

“For me, too. I can’t put the feeling into words. What’s it feel like to you?”

“Thanksgiving,” he said. “It feels exactly like Thanksgiving.”

In January 2011, I got a call from the head of the town council in Kirklin. He wanted to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of Jacob’s Place two days later.

The center wasn’t done by any stretch of the imagination, and we didn’t have a stick of furniture. I spent the next two days driving around picking up whatever furniture our friends could spare and purchasing a huge, lipstick-red circular couch with our credit card. We were so moved that the town wanted to make a fuss. Just a few years before, I hadn’t been able to convince anyone to rent me a space because our sports program was for autistic kids. Now we had a place of our own.

The ribbon cutting took place in the morning. Lots of families from Little Light and Youth Sports for Autism made the drive out. The mayor gave a speech, and the religious leaders of the town got together
and said a prayer. About twenty kids helped me cut the ribbon, and then Mike and I stood holding hands and watching as our ten-year-long dream became a reality.

That afternoon, we got our first glimpse of what the weekends would be like at Jacob’s Place. The front room is a lounge, flooded with light from the big storefront windows. One wall is taken up by an old mahogany bar, donated to us and complete with an antique Coca-Cola mirror. Eventually, we’ll sell candy there to fund some of the activities. There’s an old-fashioned popcorn machine, which we fire up on game night. In keeping with the candy store theme, we commissioned an artist to make a mural out of different-colored jelly beans, just like I’d done with the children at the daycare. The opposite wall is taken up by that enormous red velvet couch.

There are interior windows everywhere, so that parents can keep an eye on their kids (and vice versa) without having to be right on top of one another. Off the lounge, there’s a small room where the kids can watch videos and play games, and upstairs there’s a raftered study space with big tables where they can read or be tutored. There’s also a small, quiet room completely covered in soft cushions, with giant beanbags they can snuggle into. The lighting in there is on a dimmer. If kids find themselves overstimulated, they can duck in for a few minutes of sensory relief.