![]() This talk, this adult talk, is different. Their talk with me is meant, in part, to entertain me. This is serious, I know, a grownup conversation, with none of the careful enunciation or broad gestures that my father and mother use when they are talking to me. But Noah - they are already back to Noah - he's not doing this. Karl - they said my name! - he's already doing this. Noah should be doing this by now but he is not. I can sit on these steps, just out of sight, and listen. Our living, dining, and kitchen areas share one sprawling space at the top of a four-step rise from the entryway. The two of them, my parents - my father a head taller than my mother - are sitting at the dinner table drinking tea after dinner, and their voices are low. How could I have seen that Noah wasn't like other boys? What did I know of childhood development, normal or otherwise? I recall all the worry and conversation about Noah as steady background noise to which I would occasionally tune in. As soon as I was aware of myself, there he was. I was born in Kobe, Japan, on NovemNoah was born in North Tarrytown, New York, on July 1, 1966. I don't recall the precise beginning of concern. No one else in my family knew they were there, and I never told anyone about them. I used to walk up that driveway, stopping to pick the berries. We lived in Croton-on-Hudson in a white house atop a black driveway along which wild blackberry bushes bore fruit in the summer. If you take up position in his line of sight, he will look away. If you say hello, he will not look at you nor turn in the direction of your voice. He seems neither to miss company nor show any eagerness to seek it. "I don't think we're ready for them as a society, and I don't think we've really begun to focus our attention to what this is going to mean in terms of long-term care and lifestyle issues."Ī boy sits by himself on a stained white carpet, the corner of a frayed blanket stuffed into his mouth, his head bobbing, the fingers of both hands twiddling at ear level. ![]() "There are a lot of adult autistics out there in the world," he says. He notes that this is a situation that many families face. "It's hard for me to say, 'I'm learning so much from this and that makes it OK,' because I look at Noah and it's not OK."Īs his parents age, Greenfeld is coming to terms with what his responsibilities are for his brother's long-term care. "If you're hit by a car, you learn to be afraid of cars," he says. While he acknowledges that growing up with his brother taught him a certain amount of compassion and selflessness, Greenfeld notes that these lessons were forced upon him - not taken up by choice. "It's what society used to call people like Noah, and I think I use it in that more classical sense of the word." "It's not very politically correct," Greenfeld says. More than once, Greenfeld uses the word "idiot" to describe his brother. He notes that Noah was very beautiful, but that he seemed to use his charm to seduce his parents and caregivers. Greenfeld writes with a mixture of empathy for and anger toward his spitting, hair-pulling brother. Later, the dilemma shifted to how the family would care for him. Early on, the worry centered on Noah's development - why he wasn't speaking or developing like other children. Greenfeld estimates that 80 percent of family conversations were about his brother, with the remaining 20 percent left for the typical topics of any other family. I don't look back on that with any kind of self-pity it just was the reality of the situation." "I was very much the less important sibling. ![]() "Almost as soon as I have a memory of myself, the memory is of worrying about Noah," Greenfeld says. Magazine covers and television features followed, and the impact of his brother's health seemed to take over the family. After that, Noah became a national celebrity. In the 1970s, Greenfeld's father, Joshua, wrote a series of groundbreaking best-sellers about Noah's struggles. In my family, Noah became the center of everything." the gravity of the family is tilted disproportionately toward that person. As he tells Michele Norris, "when you have a developmentally disabled person in your family. In his new memoir Boy Alone, Greenfeld recounts his experiences growing up in the shadow of his brother's condition. ![]() He does not suffer from the disease, but his only brother, Noah, is severely autistic, a fact of life that has penetrated every aspect of the Greenfeld family. Journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld has lived in the shadow of autism his whole life.
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