Human Sister

ornament’s stem. Specks of glass had been embedded in its surface, lending the pear sparkle as it moved.
    Grandma helped me turn Michael, who clung to me, still crying, so that he faced away from the tree. Then she cleaned up all evidence of the former pear and hung the ornament on the same branch from which the old pear had hung. When everything was in order, Grandma and I maneuvered Michael into a position where he could see the ornament. Then she and I pointed and repeatedly said, “Michael, look. Pretty. See how pretty,” until he finally looked.
    The “uh, uh, uh’s” slowed. Stopped. He stared. He cocked his head this way and that to see the new pear from different angles, thereby undoubtedly seeing its sparkles. He smiled, pointed, and said, “Pi-ty, pi-ty.”
    Grandpa called this episode “The Death and Resurrection of the Pear.”

First Brother

    S he examines the dog’s collar and tag. “So, your name is Rusty.”
    The dog wags its tail and licks her face.
    She runs her fingers through the dog’s hair. “Your fur, just look at it. Burrs and twigs and sand. What a mess. Poor boy. Yes. Yes. Can you sit? Sit. That’s a good boy. Oh, my, it looks as though no one has groomed you in weeks.”
    She combs the dog’s hair with her fingers and picks out various forms of matter. Intermittently, she looks up. She appears to scan California Highway 1 and to peer at the town of Jenner across the estuary. She continues to perform these grooming and observing activities.
    Five minutes pass.
    “There, that’s the worst of it.”
    The dog rises from its sitting position and licks and nuzzles her.
    “Is that boat yours?” She stretches out her right arm, hand, and index finger toward the sailboat 37 meters south of them along the shore. “Is your human there?”

Sara

    F or the next two years, I was a little mother with a big baby, and I felt tired much of the time. Events such as Mom and Dad’s moving to Calgary a couple of months after the ERP’s candidate, John Jairison, won the presidential election; my summer visits to see Elio; a three-day trip with Grandma to visit Mom and Dad (but not my brothers) during their first winter holiday vacation in Canada—events that otherwise would have seemed important to me—paled in significance when compared with my responsibilities for Michael.
    During his first year, I had to feed him his special nutrient liquid nearly every hour during the day and every two or three hours during the night, assuming he slept. The liquid was clear, not white like milk, for it contained only trace amounts of minerals, such as the calcium necessary for growing bones. Michael’s skeletal structure, like First Brother’s, was fully formed at birth.
    That same year, I watched Michael learn to point to his bottle, reach for the bottle, throw fits for the bottle (fortunately, his strength had been adjusted to a low level during his first months), hold the bottle, crawl to the bottle, jabber “juice, juice” while playing with the bottle, and, finally, lead me by my hand as he crawled on two knees and an arm along the floor to the cooler where his bottle was stored.
    As with humans, Michael’s personality and intelligence were grounded in feelings and actions, and symbols and words began for him as surrogates for these feelings and actions. For example, the command “Juice!” became a shorthand way for him, beginning in his fifth month, to take my hand, lead me to the cooler, and slap its door. First came desires, actions, and experiences; then, emerging from that foundation, came intentionality, language, and self-reflective consciousness.
    As they had for me, numbers for him acquired meaning that derived from an emotional sense of more, less, big, and small. Every mouthful of nutrients got him closer to full and closer to recognizing the pattern of addition. Subtraction, likewise, became meaningful through the common experiences that got him closer to empty, to less, to out-of-time. More and less, going farther away and coming back closer—from such experiences, not from programmed arithmetic rules, came his first sense of addition and subtraction.
    Like humans, Michael was an intuitive mathematician before he first uttered the name of a number and long before he was allowed access to his Sentiren mathematics module. By contrast, my other brothers had begun with neurologic modules primed for, and right on the verge of, language, math, and science. A few learning drills,