Jeff Stimpson

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism.The convenience store is a dangerous place to take Alex. I should’ve remembered that the other day as he shot past me and his little brother Ned into the pretzel aisle.

“Pretzels?” he said.

Not the big bag, I tell him, pointing to the $3 bag of Utz dark specials. He can go through one of these bags in about an hour, one after the other, the crumbs and salt raining at his feet as every cockroach in our apartment building perks up his or her antennae. Not to mention there’s little nutrition in even a big bag of Utz dark specials.

“No big bag,” I tell him.

“Pretzels! Pretzels! Pretzels!” He reaches for the big bag; each of his “pretzels!”’ ricochets off the walls of the store with more force.

I came in here making it crystal that he could get a little bag of pretzels. Perfectly clear, over and over, and Alex replied each time that he understood. I told myself that even if I had a typically developing 11-year-old, I’d probably still be laying down the law to a head just nodding me out.

I wasn’t embarrassed in the store. I modeled myself on Jill’s behavior in the middle of one recent night, when at about 3 o’clock I heard her firmly and quietly telling Alex to get back to bed. I wasn’t embarrassed. I’m too far gone in retail settings to be embarrassed.

Alex keeps insisting on the big bag. I must take him out. “I told you no big bag!”

He sprawls twice, once actually laying his head down in front of the skyscrapers of Kleenex, and once right in front of the security guard. “Hey,” says the guard;  I can tell by his tone he means, “Behave!” and not “I’m calling social services.”

Courtesy Hypnotic Aubergine via Flickr

“Alex,” I say outside, while typically-developing Ned looks on silently and shuffles his feet as if he wants to evaporate. “Do you understand why we left the store?”

“Left the store…”

“Do you understand why I took you out of the store?”

“Out of the store…”

“I took you out of the store because you were having a fit. And you knew we were going in there and not getting the big bag of pretzels. You may have a little bag of pretzels.”

“The little bag is yellow,” Ned says. “Tell him he can have ‘the yellow bag.’”

“You can have the yellow bag, Alex.”

“Yellow bag,” he says. What does this mean? Since I’m such a big believer in getting right back on the store after something like this, we head back in. As we pass the security guard, he smiles at us.

The same thing happens. Big surprise. Out we go. The guard doesn’t look at us.

Ned is even quieter on the walk home. “Ned, what do you want me to say?” I ask.  “That you have no right to be embarrassed? That you every right to be embarrassed?

“You were telling him two different things,” Ned says. “He doesn’t understand ‘big bag’ and ‘little bag’.”

I think he does. I think he lured me into the store by appearing to agree with the idea of buying a small bag of pretzels when he really was planning to just get the bigger bag. Meltdowns in the autism world aren’t quite the same as meltdowns outside that world, and even as he sprawled in front of the tissues and heads began to pivot, I understood Alex, and I was in a tiny way kind of proud.