Life With Clay

Last Friday afternoon, Clay’s camp put on a show on the stage at a local middle school. A musical history of the past 50 years, of course.

Clay’s group danced to “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog.”

Afterwards, while the crowd surged out of the school headed for vans and cars, his aide (he has a one-on-one aide working with him throughout the day) shared a story with my wife.

We have been sending Clay’s keyboard to camp, and his aide has been using it to communicate, play games and generally interact. (Turns out Clay has a good grasp of Disney trivia, mostly garnered from the endless trailers the company piles on to the beginning of all of its videos.) One day recently the camp director came over to see what all the fuss was about with Clay and his typing. To demonstrate, his aide started with what she thought was a direct and simple question:

“Where do you go to school?”

Clay typed the name of a local bartending school.

His aide burst out laughing. Turns out she attended a class at that school earlier in the summer, and had been talking about it. It may not look like it, but Clay is always listening and absorbing.

He did then type the correct name of the high school he will be going to and fielded some other questions.

About an hour later, some of the counselors were curious if he had been confused about the bartending school or was being deliberately funny. So the aide tried again.

“Were you kidding when you said you went to bartending school?”

“Yes.”

Then he started giggling.

“What are you laughing at?”

“My joke,” he typed.

The little guy can be funny. Maybe it shouldn’t feel so unexpected.