Free Following Ezra by Tom Fields-Meyer Page B

mother of an older boy with autism, and recount how my son has managed to insult not one but two fat guys in a single day. She chuckles—clearly she has endured such encounters herself—and then offers advice.
    “Our children are concrete thinkers,” she explains. “We need to help them to draw connections between specific experiences and general rules.” Use this mishap, she suggests, to teach Ezra a more universal idea: that it’s not polite to talk about other people’s bodies, even if you’re not talking directly to the people.
    It sounds like a good plan, and I can say those words to Ezra, but I don’t feel that I have the ability to make him understand. Besides, even with our greatest efforts to impart that wisdom, Ezra seems fascinated and drawn to variations in the human physique. Uncensored, he obsessively points out and comments on not just overweight people, but a laundry list of oddities: men’s bald scalps, birthmarks on faces, deformed limbs, people in wheelchairs, tattoos, and facial piercings. Like Superman—or a paparazzo—he has an uncanny ability to spot these things from across crowded rooms, up long airplane aisles, in supermarkets from three cash registers away, and through lanes of traffic on busy urban streets. He seems so incapable of withholding comment that his brother Ami develops a sixth sense, his own detector for spotting such people and then steering Ezra out of the way. Waiting at a crosswalk beside his brother, Ami, eagle-eyed, will notice a homeless man in a wheelchair approaching and block Ezra’s view with his own body, smiling as he tries to offer distraction.
    In a crowded building lobby, I watch Ezra rush up to an elderly woman with a port-wine stain covering half her face. I cringe as Ezra cranes his neck, finally pressing his own face right up to the woman’s to get a gander, and dread what he might say.
    “You’re old ,” Ezra says.
    “You’re young ,” the woman quips back.
    The first day of a new drama program for children with special needs, Ezra manages to contain himself for most of the session. Before it’s time to go, the kids, parents, and staffers hold hands in a circle and sing a song. Ezra is antsy, but complies, and then, on his own, he approaches the program’s director, a dynamic, tiny woman. I think of what a breakthrough I am witnessing, that without prompting, Ezra might offer his thanks and greetings. Then he puts his hands on her shoulders.
    “You are a not long person!” he says.
    That makes for another extensive conversation on the car ride home. We have talked about weight, not about height.
    Or aging.
    “You have wrinkly skin,” he’ll say to the drugstore clerk. “Does that mean you’re going to die soon?”
    Few things escape his notice. Meeting a woman, he’ll seem to stare intently for a moment, lost in thought, then say, “You have makeup all over your face.”
    Lying on the chair at the dentist’s office after the hygienist finishes cleaning his teeth, he excitedly—and abruptly—greets the bearded dentist. “Hi, Dr. Bendik! Do you ever shave?”
    Though some people are taken aback, others find Ezra’s honesty to be refreshing. Lacking the impulse to censor his thoughts, he simply speaks the objective truth. As Shawn likes to say, Ezra is the master of uttering what everyone else is thinking.
    He’s like the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story, the boy is the hero—the one who articulates what no one else has the nerve to say.
    In reality, that kind of honesty is rarely rewarded. I sometimes think about my own difficulty negotiating Shawn’s question when she comes home from a shopping excursion with a new outfit, tries it on, and innocently asks, “How does this look on me?” After years of marriage, I still haven’t figured out how to finesse that simple query. How will Ezra ever learn to navigate these waters?
    As much as I marvel at the honesty of