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Show at them with her fists. I suppose the game was great fun for all involved. I can picture those girls who hid behind chairs and under tables while Patty flew at them, using good localization skills and eyesight she was not suppose to have. "Untestable," they had said. She was winning all the way and having the time of her life doing it. There is a single picture of Patty in my albums. She has been stilled in mid-flight, as she soars in a swing while laughing and poking her eye. And I see Patty as the future of one of my younger children, poking a fork into her head while feeling the hurt, and hitting herself until her eye sockets become pale purple. I see them both, standing like a stiff puppet line of marionettes, whose strings have lowered their heads and hands, while keeping each back stiff and straight. They stand at a distance, waiting. Nothing will move them except the most violent of storms, battles yet to be fought. Patty peers at the sun the way I remember Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notreftflame as he sat bound to the wheel, peering out at the crowd which mocked him. But she is silent. And I don't know even then that I will come to love her- The word "lessons" to a teacher of the multiplehandicapped, has a special and rather different meaning. We teach daily, but a real "lesson" is when a major breakthrough of some kind has been achieved. One can go for months without ever having a first "lesson." At our first "lesson," Patty used her whole repertoire of tricks. She played along silently for weeks, enjoying the games and responding only to the strength of my own larger size and firm expectations. The battles had become standing ones, from lying flat on the floor to sitting in a chair and finally to standing. She liked these games of learning, they were more entertaining than total isolation and silence, and it was more attention than she had ever known before. That is, until we discovered things that Patty did not want to do. Things not in the pattern she controlled, tasks that would either expand her world or frighten her. Seventeen years of patterns. -5- |