I’m a night owl these days, mostly by necessity, but I can’t deny a little nature, too.  I always enjoy early mornings, the day stirring and the coffee brewing, but I also like to sleep.  An alarm takes all the fun out of getting up, so I wander around in the wee hours and count my blessings.

I’m the night watchman for my house, making the rounds, flashlight in hand (actually an iPod; they have many uses), checking locks and trying not to trip over the dog.  I’ve learned to walk like Robin Hood, aware of every stray branch and fallen leaf just waiting to crackle underfoot, gliding silently through the forest toward the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men, preparing my surprise attack, although now I think I’ve probably told you too much about what goes through my mind late at night.

Sometimes I pass by my son, all 6 feet 3 inches of him, stretched out in a recliner in the family room, sound asleep.  He’s always been this way, a nomad at night.  Sometimes, when he was little, we’d find him asleep in a cabinet, or a closet, sometimes in the hallway and sometimes at the foot of our bed.  It made no sense but then some people are different.

It wasn’t just the strange sleeping behavior.  There was the impulsiveness that took little-boy energy to a new level; I still shudder sometimes when I pass a certain spot in Everett, remembering a night with car trouble, a daughter to pick up, and hanging on for dear life to a 2-year-old boy while simultaneously trying to use a pay phone.  I’m not sure I still have nightmares of losing him, letting go and watching him slip away into a world of Strangers, but I did, oh yeah.

There were other things.  Odd things, some that set off alarms and some that just seemed unique and quirky.  The repetitive movements, the lack of eye contact, the strange social behavior.  The absence of friends.  The rage, sometimes, when he was small and would suddenly strike out at anything.

I dragged him into his room one day, filled with my own rage, matching him scream for scream, tossed him onto his bed and finally, out of frustration, dumped the entire contents of a water bottle on his head.  That shut him up, anyway, and I stormed out, ashamed at losing my temper at a little boy but still feeling justified, and a while later his mom found him in the same position, sitting on the floor, soaked and shivering.

“I’m cold,” he said, all of 6 years old, and I might as well have set him on fire, given his neurology, I know this now.

I know lots of things now.

I know, for instance, why a little boy would sleep in a closet.

I know, as much as I can, how the world must seem to someone hypersensitive, someone to whom every loud noise is a slap, an assault.  Every squeak, every siren.  Every smell, every taste, every touch, all heightened and intrusive and, often, a horror.

And then there was this: When my son was small, he spun a story for me one night, told me about having lived another life, a normal life as a normal man, a world in which “autism” was just a word, and then he died and went to heaven.  He wanted to stay, but God told him he was needed down here on earth, so he came back.  He doesn’t remember telling me this.  I think about it all the time.

And one particular time, a few years ago, I needed him.  I’d become lost myself somehow, a victim of my own bad behavior and bad choices, maybe bad luck and bad genes, who knows?   I just know that my son, at a point where he could barely leave the house, traveled across the mountains to be at my side, stood up in front of people and said, “I’ve always worried about him,” and “He’s the BEST dad ever,” and somehow he found me again.  I think about this a lot, too.

My son turned 20 this week.  He’s my constant companion these days, but he now has more than me.  He has professional guides, people who know the forest, compassionate by nature and trained.  He’s doing well.  He tolerates the world better, but mostly he just sucks it up, takes deep breaths and wanders out into it, cautious and anxious but out.  He is, in so many ways, the bravest person I know.

He doesn’t read the newspaper.  He has only mild interest in what I do, or what I think.  He doesn’t know I watch him sometimes while he sleeps, sometimes for a long time.  I worry, I think about my failures as a father, but mostly I just watch, late at night, doing the best I can, standing guard over my boy.