Do Mustaches & Eyebrows Make the Icon? Plus the Lonliness of the Aspergers Boy

The secret life of kids always fascinates me…

Drove to Rochester for Lillian’s birthday festivities. Lillian is the only one of the Plunkett descendents save RTT to show signs of impending beauty. She’s quite the 11-year-old clothes horse too, sneakers to die for – purple iridescent patchwork and rainbow laces.

In the car ride home, RTT describes listening clandestinely to hip-hop with Lillian and her 8-year-old brother, Sid. “Really!” I said. “Can’t imagine their parents approve of that.”

“They don’t know. Also Sid steals. A lot.”

I used to steal too when I was Sid’s age. Many, many years later I put it together: I was stealing love ‘cause I wasn’t getting any.

Hard to know what Sid is stealing. He’s the Obama biography except the father didn’t desert the family physically although each time I see Kareem, he grows more and more remote. These days he’s sleep walking through his existence in the United States, it’s something he has to endure before he can go back to Senegal where he spends increasingly long amounts of time. Of course, that’s the hardest thing in the world, isn’t it? To grow up one place, to be shaped and molded by that place, and then to have to leave. Kareem was lucky – he had a sponsor who helped get him out; he got a PhD in French literature (of all unlikely things!), he landed a teaching job at a small Indiana college. Married Sue – a rather phlegmatic, blunt woman, unattractive by American standards. They hardly seem to notice each other in mixed company. Sired two children, Sid and Lillian. Spends 14 weeks out of the year in Senegal where he built a house and is now a grand man.

Made only one demand of the Westernized portion of his life – and that is that Sid be brought up in the Islamic religion.

Maybe that’s why Sid steals.

“Lillian’s going to be very beautiful when she grows up, isn’t she?” Robin continues.

“I think so, yes. What did you think of Sam?”

“Oh, Sam,” says Robin dismissively. “He just follows me around, imitating everything I do. It’s annoying.”

In the old days, Sam had Asperger’s. Now that Asperger’s is no longer a diagnosis, Sam is just mildly autistic. Whitney, his mother, had successfully shielded Sam from the full impact of just how different he is, but now that Sam is about to turn 13, he can’t really be protected anymore. You can see him grappling with his teenage desire to be just like everyone else and the demands of his strangely wired nervous system. It’s kind of sad.

“Sam needs a role model,” I told Robin. “He’s nominated you. Try to cut him a lot of slack. It can’t be easy being Sam.”

“He’s just so weird,” says Robin.

In fact, the whole family is rather eccentric. Sam’s father Steve is a brilliant industrial designer, one of my favorite people in the Plunkett-Rapp offshoot of that family – although actually, come to think of it, I pretty much like all of them. I rather think Steve is mildly autistic himself. Oliver – named for St. Oliver Plunkett from whom the family is descended – is a rather charming, hippie kid, two years younger than Sam, with shoulder length hair. One year Oliver gave up eating meat for Lent; he never started eating it again. It was interesting to see that Sam’s hair yesterday was approaching Oliver’s in length – in the absence of any other role models, he was even willing to try out his happy, eccentric but undeniably normal younger brother’s specs.

Halfway through the afternoon, I picked a biography of Mark Twain a/k/a Samuel Clemens off Lucinda’s bookshelf. Lucinda let me take it home.

There’s a photograph in it of a very young Sam Clemens without the iconic mustache! And before his eyebrows began to grow out in circumflexes. It didn’t look like Mark Twain. I must have spent a good hour staring at it, thinking, Why he doesn’t look special at all. He looks normal. I pass eleven people who look just like him every time I pump gas.

I don’t know why that mustache-less Mark Twain made such an impression on me. But he did.