February 2006: A Valentine from Peter (cont.)

And still I want the card, the thought that is in the card, to be from him.

Peter was practically born talking. When he was nine months old, he spoke in paragraphs. No words yet, of course, but all the inflections, the hand gestures, the solemn intent to communicate. At two he talked until my head ached. In junior high, he got himself into trouble with other boys by constantly using words they didn’t know. In his late thirties he began pausing in the middle of an account to say something like, “Small animal . . . black, white stripe.” And his listener would say, “skunk.” And he would say, “Yeah,” and go on. Now, if I try to talk to him on the phone, we mostly sit in silence. Words no longer belong to him.

He can’t remember the names of his three boys. When asked in the hall of the nursing home to introduce his wife, he can think neither of her name, Katy, nor of the word for what she is to him, wife. But he knows she is there. He knows to the bottom of his soul.

The day will come, we all understand, when he will not know even this. For now, he has lost mostly the words.