Susan Senator

Listen with your heart, you will understand.
–Grandmother Willow

Just now I was playing the marble game with Nat. He was getting into it; I could tell because of all of the self-talk — both of us: I was babbling stuff like, “Oh, cool!” and “Oops, that’s the wrong way to match it up.” And Nat was doing his thing, words all stretched out or truncated, disguised so that he can be left alone.
At one point I invited Ned in to see our tower, and Nat demonstrated how all the marbles just go in, down, around, down, down. Always. Ned then pointed out to me a tower of books he’s going to resell to the Brookline Booksmith, our beloved indie bookstore, and Nat looked up and said, “Go to bookstore.”
Right away we both responded, “Okay, Nat. We can walk to the bookstore tomorrow after lunch.”
Nat said, “Walkabookstore tomorrowafterlunch, yes.“
Okay, so that was a plan.
Ned left to go play with Ben, who is working on drawing cartoon frames to make an animated film. I went back to building with Nat, trying to get in a little bit of science (“blah blah blah gravity”) — you can’t blame a mom for trying! But Nat kept on just self-talking and putting in the marbles.
I heard him saying, “Taaaaaaaaaaaae waaaaaaaaaaaw boohstore. Taaaaaaaaae train. Waaaaaaaaaaw traiaiaaiaiaiaiaiaia”
“Whoa!” I said, “You said, “take a walk to the bookstore. Take a train.”
Nat looked down, saying, “Noooo.” He was very uncomfortable.
But I persisted. “Nat! You don’t like when I know what you’re saying. But I want to know. I want to know what you’re thinking.” I said this very slowly and let it sit there.

Then Nat said, perfectly and clearly: “I want to go to the bookstore after lunch tomorrow.”