My son’s message of support may have changed a stranger’s life
BY Susan Baker FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL
INSPIRE
AFTER A SLEEPY Saturday morning on my son Andrew’s 15th birthday, I whisk him off to a shoe shop near our home in Toronto to get a pair of sandals. We know the exact style and size he wants, and we time the trip to arrive right when the store opens. Andrew is nonspeaking autistic and prefers to go shopping when it’s not busy.
“Size 41 of those black slip-on sandals, please,” I tell the two clerks at the shop when we arrive.
Andrew slips his socked feet into the shoes with no protest or head banging (signs of distress we have seen in the past). A perfect fit. We box them up and pay, and I thank the staff.
As we head toward the door, I say, “It’s Andrew’s birthday today. Fifteen! Got our new shoes and now we’re off to celebrate with family.”
“Happy birthday!” the sales assistants reply. “Have fun!”.
What comes next only happens when you act on intuition, when the voice inside tells you to do things differently.
Instead of having Andrew point to the “thank you” symbol on the picture chart he carries with him, I pause and hold up his letterboard.
For ten years, we have carried around a rudimentary picture chart, which Andrew uses to communicate. It contains images that match his most important and most used words: people, places, food, greetings and activities. Over the years, neighbourhood kids, friends, cousins and classmates have studied the pictures and the strips at the top of the chart that contain even more “representations” of Andrew’s life.
The chart is banged up and dirty. It has been lost, found and replaced.
Andrew also uses a text-to-voice app on an iPad that conveys his needs and wants, again through words with picture symbols. These tools offer him the simplest, quickest way to communicate. But they are limited to specific objects, activities and statements.
Years ago, we discovered that Andrew could communicate more than just his basic needs through the use of a letterboard—by pointing to individual letters on an alphabet grid to spell out words, statements, thoughts. It’s a simple but profound tool. We have affixed a letterboard to the back of his picture chart to spare us the trouble of carrying multiple charts and boards. Brilliant.
We came to realise that Andrew would not initiate use of the letterboa
