Autism Vox

Bike Music

by Kristina Chew, PhD on February 4th, 2008

Jim took advantage of it being Superbowl Sunday—-with, it seems, some large percentage of New Jersey residents at home in front of the TV set—-and took Charlie on an eight-mile bike ride. There was almost no traffic on the road they took and, at 56 degrees, it was a positively balmy third day of February. Charlie had at first said “no bike, no bike, no” at mention of going on a bike ride and then waited in the driveway as Jim got out the bikes. Charlie has only ridden his new bike once: It’s a mountain bike, with bigger wheels and a bigger frame than his old yellow one, and, for the first block, Charlie tip-toed down the street. He kept trying to pull up one leg and then the other onto the pedals and then kept ending up back on his toes, hands tight around the handlebars and Jim hovering on his bike. Just as they were about to head down a narrow path, I saw Charlie hike up his right leg just enough so that his foot was securely on the pedal, and then the left foot, and off he went after Jim.

A slow and cautious start, uncertain whether or not to take his feet off the ground: That’s somehow very characteristic of Charlie. He was a late walker (16 months); he never crawled and rather than “cruising” from couch to chair to table like the baby books promised (Charlie always had a way of confuting their neatly expressed claims), he held onto the couch and went back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, his forearms deeply set into the cushions. Charlie has always loved being in water but, until he was six, he clung to Jim’s back and my shoulders in the pool and then, once he figured out how to swim, nothing seemed to stop him from making his way around the entire pool. He’s careful, and then dives down to the bottom when he knows he is more than fully able.

Charlie will be turning eleven years old in May of this year. He’s been having some struggles of late in new activities (Special Olympics basketball practice) and at the usuals of home and school. We are scheduled to visit the pediatric neurologist on Friday; I’ve been factoring in the new tumults of pre-adolescence; the time of year, the big tooth that fell out on Saturday and that must have been bothering Charlie for days and even weeks. We’re starting to reaccess how he spends his time afterschool, and then there’s the fact that next Sunday is Charlie’s last piano lesson for a while, as his teacher is taking some time off.

The car ride to the lesson—under a bright blue sky, with jazz playing on the radio—was all smiles and laughs for Charlie, but these were gone when I opened the door in the parking lot in front of his teacher’s apartment. Charlie cried when he got out and threw himself loudly on the grass before running into the teacher’s living room, sitting on the couch, and banging on a bruise on his forehead. The teacher and I looked at each other and he asked me what I thought it best to do; I said for Charlie to play the piano and earn his pennies on his token board. Charlie played the new exercise with the sharps perfectly, sped through “The Blue Danube Waltz,” and sight-read “Skip to My Loo” easily. (And then went to lie down on the couch behind the keyboard.) Charlie’s teacher has made up a series of piano books to teach special needs children to play the piano; in anticipation of the no more lessons for awhile, I asked him which book Charlie might be at.

“Oh, Charlie’s finished all seven levels,” was the answer. Charlie is still learning to read music—-not sure when to play middle C or the C an octave above—and he has trouble coordinating playing with both hands and in switching back and forth from them, but his progress at the piano has been carefully guided, gradual, and steady. His teacher told me that the goal is to have Charlie playing from “regular sheet music.” Charlie can barely read words, but he is learning to read lines of music, treble and bass clef, and the songs keep getting longer, and I look forward to the day when I take my old piano books out of storage and see if he’d like to try his hand at “Rondo a la Turque.”

It’s not that music or Mozart (as this article on Auditory Integration Therapy suggests) might “cure” Charlie; it’s not that Charlie is on his way to becoming the next Glenn Gould (though I do love to hear him playing, and humming to, the Goldberg Variations). But when Charlie’s playing music and reading music, when Charlie’s in motion on his bike and paying attention to what is left and what is right and looking up for the street signs, I get a glimpse of how sound and movement seem to tap into something that is different about the way that Charlie learns and interfaces with the world, and not with words and language so much.

It’s really lovely music, like a certain boy gliding to a graceful stop and carefully squeezing the brakes.

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POSTED IN: Bike, Charlisms, Education, Language, Music, Parenting, Sports