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As we said our good byes, the girl asked me if I like hawks, and a bunch of other birds she ticked off her fingers. I wasn't sure, I didn't know very much about birds. And then she leaped right into telling me everything she could about what made each kind special. She had her ear muffs on and was all bundled up. They were supposedly leaving. I could feel the mom smiling politely, ready to interrupt as non-chalantly as she could. I listened carefully and deliberately, making sure that the mom could see that I was engaged. It's really okay, I wanted to tell her. This is a place where she can be herself. It's okay.

I told the girl. You like animals, don't you? Maybe you'll work with animals one day as an ornithologist...? And she nodded and kept going. The mom interrupted gently, owls are her favorite, you'll soon know all about them, she told me with a look and then said good bye for both of them.

It dawned on me the girl has Asperger's or some form of high functioning autism.

You know what else? The parents are both Harvard grads. The dad runs with hubby in a group on week ends. Though the stay at home dad, he runs marathons several times a year and actively engages brain power in everything. His wife is always on the road, as a high level exec at some company. Neither parent had ever told me anything much about their daughter. But asking Izzy, I found out that the girl has few friends and gets teased a lot at school. That once Izzy stuck up for her and then Izzy proceeded to get teasedm herself. I also found out from the girl that playing flute in band had been a disaster and she never wanted to go back. She told me what her parents didn't tell me. She was always 10 bars behind everyone else, she said, and never knew what was going on and was always forgetting how to read the music. It was really stressful! Band is hard! I told her, there are so many kids and sounds to make sense of, and the band teacher doesn't have time to help anyone individually. Don't worry, we are going to work one on one, you will learn to read music and play some great pieces. And at the last class, you'll play a duet with another pianist. It's going to be great! I promised.

Last week, another student's mom told me that her hubby took extra time to graduate MIT because he was beaten to the pulp while a student there. She had gotten degrees from Columbia University. First of all, though I knew him to be brilliant, I had no idea the dad had attended and graduated MIT. It devastated me to discover that he had been the victim of such violence. The dad is a little different and Aspergersy, and his son - my student - now a student at Eagle Hill, has turned out to be very similar. He is on the autism spectrum.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is our story is no different from these in a way. Hubby was at MIT, too. Me at Juilliard. And we are both type As. We, too, produced a quirky child on the autism spectrum. Is the moral of the story, going forward, that our children should partner up with those more in the middle and balanced, not anyone too distinguished? Because when 2 type A, competitive and cerebral types come together, they increase their chances of creating a kid on the autism spectrum?