The Bronze Medal

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home  |  March 3rd, 2009

This is a long one. I’m sorry.

The other day as I was waiting on line at the bagel shop to order my lunch, I noticed a woman who looked vaguely familiar, although I could not quite place where I knew her from. I could tell from the expression on her face that she was having the same trouble, so I just assumed she was a patron from the library and gave her one of those “I know I know you from somewhere but obviously not somewhere memorable enough to have a clue where, so I’m just going to acknowledge it and move on” head nods.

A couple of minutes later I hear this loud voice from behind me reciting the slogan of one of the local radio stations - the type where they say their station is the place for all the hits of [insert list of decades here] - and I mean this guy is really projecting it, with a deep voice too, it’s almost as if he’s rehearsing for an announcer job at the station, as if that’s his next stop after he eats his bagel.

At first I just ignore it as everyday strangeness, pay for my lunch, and go to walk out. But as I walk past the guy, who loks like he could be anywhere from 16-20, I see that he’s standing with the woman who had looked familiar to me. And I can tell right away, by the way she’s watching him, and particularly the way she’s watching his movements and where his attention is drifting too, that she’s with him in some caretaker role, that he isn’t alright to be on his own for some reason. And then, looking at the two of them together, in that context, I figure out where I remembered them from.

About 5 years ago I worked at a chain record store in the local mall while I paid my way through college. And every week we saw this very woman come in with her young son, 10-11 at the time, and who was autistic, and almost completely non-verbal. I can even remember the first time he came in, because it set the pattern for all the following times - he would come in and go right to the compilations section and find the “Now that’s what I call music…” series, which at that time numbered somewhere between 15-20 individual CDs, and each one came in a different color package. And this young kid would go right to work re-arranging the series, placing them in order by color and not by number. And not in ROYGBIV order either - he had some schema known only to him, some sort of internal guidelines the rest of us had no clue how to decipher, and yet to him it made sense and was real and unchanging, since he would re-arrange them each time the same exact way.

After he left we would always put them back into number order, and each week or so he would be back putting them in color order. And I always thought it would have been nice of us to just leave them his way, and if any customers complained about having trouble finding the right volume, telling them to go and fuck themselves. Both because they had shit taste in music and because, really, what would it hurt for us to carve out a little space where someone who sees the world differently can have things his way.

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