...12 (in days gone by)...

 In Days Gone By:
14.October.2018

"Mami?", he asked me, in the car on the way home from church.

"Mami, why are you so good at conversing?"

"Am I?", I replied.

"Yes. You know how to keep a conversation going. How to stop the awkward parts."

I thought to myself, silently.

We'd left church as usual, after a quick chat with the minister. She's marvelous, by the way. Marvelous at remembering specifics about every one of her parishioners and making each of us feel special and valued. During our chat, she had thanked him for the online-convo they'd had, with me as stenographer, last week in our church's facebook page for "The Chronicles of Narnia" reading club event. She expressed that she'd really enjoyed all he had to share. He nodded his head, eyes down, standing next to me as rigid as usual. I jumped in, saying for him "He enjoyed it too. Johannes is really quite good at expressing himself via the written word, though sometimes his fingers can't keep up with his thoughts."

Further on in the conversation, our minister had the lightbulb moment...she said "Oh, so auditory processing disorder?" Again, I replied for him (his translator of sorts!) and said yes, and explained his difficulties with communication, both outgoing and receptive, and how finding the right medium (writing and sometimes dictating) has finally allowed him to share his intellect, personality, creativity, etc...

So...fast forward...back to the car...and the question.

I replied as best I could that I had not always been such.

In fact, for much of my life, I had a crippling shyness-a crippling insecurity.

But that had changed with his diagnosis and not only the new role I had to assume as his advocate-his translator, but also as my world closed in on me because his needed to be smaller.

He didn't want the how....the technique, or the outline, or the plan....he didn't want a script to run with. He simply wanted the why.

And I knew, in that moment, that the logic of him...the super-computer of a brain that he has, was looking for a reason to expand past his own limitations.

What he wanted was a measureable, scientific reason to try to push past his disability.

I told him "Conversation, and the connection that comes from words exchanged (even with strangers in passing) is what allows us to live in an expanded world where other people and their experiences and opinions can spark new challenges and ideas in us. It allows our world to be so much bigger than our own individual interest."

And he answered "I guess that's the same reason why you write, huh?"