Alex, my 5-year-old autistic son, has puzzles of a garbage truck, a
tow truck, and a dump truck. Each has 49 pieces, each piece a little
bigger than a quarter. In the dump truck scene, there's also a guy laying
bricks, a red-headed driver, and, in the background, three birds and a
crane. The garbage truck scene includes a sanitation worker in an
orange jumper, a stone wall, and a guy strapping a bike to the roof of a red
compact. The tow truck scene has a smashed-up blue car, a cop, a
photographer, a guy in red coveralls working the winch, and a dog on a leash
staring right at Alex as he softly snaps the pieces together.
I timed Alex the other day. Garbage truck: 11 minutes. Tow truck: 9
minutes. Dump truck: 15 minutes. The three birds and the crane must
slow him down.
These are not Alex's first puzzles. He also has a 36-piece school
bus, big pieces but a ton of blue. I dumped it out the other night, to
keep him occupied while my wife Jill and I entertained our friend
Jessica. Jessica and I watched Alex trying the pieces this way and that, never
lifting his head. "He's fast," Jessica said. The bus took 10 minutes,
and he then began trolling for something else to do. Sooner or later,
such searching leads him to screeching or to Jill's dresser, where he
roots out her stuff. I dumped out Ned's two Thomas the Tank Engine
puzzles.
"Is Alex doing two puzzles at once?" Jessica asked. He was. Before
he brushed his teeth and asked for his binkie, Alex also completed his
24-piece Elmo and 24-piece Clifford. At the same time.
Alex has been doing puzzles almost since he could sit up. He started
with big plastic shape-sorters: squares, circles, and rectangles of
red, blue, green, purple. Before he'd even eaten by mouth, I think, he was
plunking the shapes through the right holes. "That'll translate into
good skills with letters when he's older," a therapist noted. Then came
the wooden puzzles: a "Sesame Street" farm, barnyard animals, boats and
copters, a school bus, a fire engine. Each piece in these puzzles
tucked into a cutout in the wooden base. These puzzles are now entombed in
the boys' dresser. I joked to Jill the other night that Alex could do
one of these now just by looking at it.
"I don't know about that," she replied, "but I do think he could do
one of them with his eyes closed."
Even though he's in kindergarten, Alex still doesn't have many
words, so he couldn't tell us about his talent. "Does he ever do puzzles
here?" Jill once asked his pre-school teacher.
Oh yes, all the time, the teacher replied.
"But ever jigsaw puzzles?" Jill wanted to know.
Yes, of course jigsaw puzzles, the teacher said. Twelve-piecers!
My 3-year-old son Ned, who is typically developing, started doing
puzzles for the same reason he bit a plastic ruler in half last night:
Alex does it. Sometimes the brothers do puzzles next to each other at
their little table. The quiet of concentration blankets the house. The
quiet of a library, of a chess game, of craftsmen. But right now, Ned is
more like the guy in that office who talks when everyone is busy. Once
over puzzles Ned softly chattered support to Alex, who at last got so
fed up and distracted that he left the garbage truck unfinished.
"Daddy, I need help!" Ned will say. "I can't do it!"
"You are doing it, Ned," I say. Alex doesn't even look up,
his attention anchored on the 49 pieces. "Stay on it, Alex!" I call, as I
fly into the kitchen to do the dishes or bag the trash or some such
chore that seems more important than watching my son do puzzles, but in
fact isn't.
Less and less, Alex needs help on a puzzle. He prefers to link the
first two pieces, then work and sort by color, and test-fit pieces
almost one-by-one. He used to need me to find the corners. He used to need
me to find the edges. Now he just needs me to dump the pieces out of the
Zip-Lock bag and put them right-side-up. Sometimes. I wonder if he
could do this too, but thinks it's nice to let me help. Wise guy. Where's
that 60-piece Noah's Ark?
