What do you do with a Gifted Child? (PART TWO)

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 CONTINUED FROM PART ONE

After a cab ride from Poighte Regional, we got home. Across the intersection from our house is a Homestore-24. Little Seevers emerged from the cab and snapped out of his catatonia. He didn't want to go home. He ran across the street - two cars collided to avoid the little guy, the afternoon sunlight bouncing off the tips of his Baby Jordan laces - and I had to give chase, waving my apologies to the married couple and the family of four in their cars, more interested in checking themselves for injuries than looking to see where Seevers was going. I caught him and he bit me and kicked me. I had to let him go.

Our luggage was still on the sidewalk across the street, so I let him run into the safe environment of Homestore-24, and I sat at the kerbside, watching the suitcases. I phoned his father - he is actually my wife's husband - and I told him to come and help with Little Seevers. I checked my email, correcting essay papers and annotating a peer review while I waited for Seevers to emerge.

Ten minutes later, Seevers sprinted from the Homestore-24 with an ax in hand. A checkout clerk followed him out and Little Seevers swung the ax twice in two big whumps, disabling the man in both legs.

Seevers looked at the ax, and looked at the man on the ground, bleeding out from the kneecaps. Then he looked over at a sycamore along our tree-lined avenue. His eyes sparkled. He'd figured out how to use the ax. He charged at the tree and started chopping.

A crowd gathered. Oh good, I thought. It takes a village to raise a child.

I was going to ask one of the people staring at Seevers to go and fetch my luggage across the street. But some of the onlookers were pulling out their phones, looking at me in disgust.

"I've already called my baby's father," I explained."My baby daddy?"

The police arrived. By this time, Seevers had built up a bonfire and distributed it with a mathematical evenness under a number of parked cars, lighting the wood with gas fluid and matches he had retrieved from the store.

He had also managed to lob his sneakers into the middle of the intersection: Even at three years of age, he was a very gifted tosser. But he was even faster in his bare feet, in his gifted way. It took five police officers and three Tazers to bring him down.

A policeman came up to me and asked me what I was doing as he instructed me to stand up while he readied his handcuffs.

"This is perfectly normal because my child is an autist savant. Autistic," I explained slowly in a non-academic drawl I had learned on the local club scene, as a car exploded. "Do you understand? It's my truth! And Little Seevers's father is on the way. Anyway, I'll take him home to bed now that he's unconscious."

"Ohhhh! Autistic!" the officer nodded. "My nephew does stuff like this all the time!"

We fistbumped.

"But you know, you should really be better able to take care of your child," the policeman said, judgementally.

"But you're not going to arrest me," I explained to the officer, getting out my Twitter.

"Of course not!"

The five policemen departed.

Then my wife's husband arrived, and carried Little Seevers home while I brought in the luggage.

So I was almost arrested because of my gifted little boy! I guess the message here is if you feel the need to intervene when a child is screaming, just let the child scream it out, whether you're in the shopping mall, or even at the tennis court! If you want to get involved, do so without judgement because you don't have all the facts! It's a challenge to every decent human being's soul. Just remember to bring down your Rawlsian curtain of ignorance over any such incident, just as I bring down the curtain now, on my #wunnerful #personalessay.