Maybe she figures it out. Maybe she realizes that this young man is special in a way not implied by the sign over the cash register proclaiming: "All our customers are special." Maybe she relaxes a bit; maybe she even enjoys suspending her routine to watch my son as he prints the store's name on the check in letters like sticks thrown on the sidewalk, as he pauses to ask her how to spell "forty." Or not; she might exchange annoyed looks with the other not-as-special customers who are piling up behind him with their boxes of computer peripherals and televisions. She might even grin when one of them brays his impatience.

How much of this does my son notice on this day of firsts -- his first time taking the five-mile bus ride to this store from his new apartment, his first time making such a large purchase on his own? I'm not there but my guess is, not much. My guess is that he's thinking of the burly electronics inside the box, of the spot he's cleared for the boombox on his dresser between the Special Olympics medals and the bowling trophy. He's thinking of the well-ordered plentitude of his music; he's deciding which tape or CD he will play first and he knows exactly where it rests, in which case, in which Plexiglas slot. He doesn't notice the stares and grumbles, and they won't change the way he makes his way through this checkout line the next time he visits this store. These are details nearly as arcane to him as the rules of punctuation or boccie ball.

This kind of oblivion has been both a curse and a blessing during his 25 years. On this day, it would be a blessing. Matthew leaves the store's mutterers behind. He grips his boombox under one arm, and he tromps to the bus stop as his other arm pistons into a January fog. After he finds his seat on the bus, after he settles his package on his knees, he raises his fists and shakes them around his face like maracas. This is how he expresses joy.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I was a little girl with apocalyptic visions. I was also very practical; every night, during my last moments of clarity before sleep, I worked out strategies to avert disaster. Worried that people were frittering away the world's supply of fresh water, I imagined household systems that caught lightly used water and piped it into gardens. Mindful of the burgeoning pile of human waste, I imagined adding a mystery ingredient to ordinary poop and turning it into something useful like bricks or asphalt. And then there was overpopulation: I imagined peeling away all the layers of humanity that made life harder or less pleasant. I made whole categories of human beings vanish: the bad people who were in prison, the crazy people who shouted from street corners, the retarded people who didn't really do any harm but weren't able to contribute much, either. Before I fell asleep, I always amended this last final solution: My older cousin Stephen could stay in my emptier, ideal world. He was retarded, but he was always very sweet to me.

My Matthew, my first child, was born nearly 20 years later in a hulking old Cleveland hospital. The pregnancy was lovely until the final, ponderous weeks, and the delivery was unremarkable until Matt slid into the doctor's hands. Then, from way up at the head of the bed, I heard all the voices in the room assume a quiet, measured urgency, as if they were creating a blockade of words to keep something quick and terrible from being said. They didn't bring him to me, at first. Then someone came to tell me he had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and that my amniotic fluid had been stained with his excrement. I'm sure I asked if he was all right and I'm sure they told me something, but it wasn't until days later, after he spent his first days in an isolette and had been observed and tested, that they told me he was fine.

I don't know that I ever believed them. Although I never saw Matt lined up with all the other newborns in the hospital nursery, he seemed different from the other babies I knew. He was pale, his eyes were puffy and bruised looking, and his waking moments were filled with noise -- not the howling his father and I had braced ourselves for, but chirps and grunts and twitters. He generated his own white noise. When I'd tell other people about this, they'd sometimes pat my arm indulgently and tell me each baby had its own enigmatic little personality. Give yourself time to get to know him, they said.

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