Laundry Saga (The Uplifting Kind)

I sometimes wonder if the ability to launder clothes at home is one of American civilization's great divides. Anymore, it is utilitarian and lonely, with people sticking to their loads or their technology and paying no mind to those around them.

The characters have not disappeared from laundromats. Upon my first visit, I noticed an elderly man with a walker and a prosthetic leg drain three 20-oz. Cokes while his driers spun. Later, I overheard the place's manager describe him to a tee, only adding that the old man had a severe case of diabetes - and judging by his favorite drink, a death wish.

Tuesday night draws its regulars. One young couple loads their wares together, only taking breaks to bring their three little ones back in line.

But they weren't the ones who stuck with me, week after week. A black man a few years older than me with a senior-aged white woman giving him orders with the laundry. He followed each cue silently yet vigorously.

Since childhood, I knew the ticks and gestures of my brother Joe, who is severely mentally handicapped and falls under the broad autism diagnosis. Out in public, I learned the need to withhold judgment if someone acted a little abnormally. In every instance, they were like Joe, or they were ignorant fools openly mocking people like Joe. The man had a gaze and smile too innocent for anything but autism. His gestures had the same unmistakable sway.

For some reason, my encounters with the handicapped (I don't know what word best describes them) usually jumpstart my emotions. Perhaps it owes something to my relationship with my brother. Perhaps it has more to do with the innocence and harmlessness many radiate.

It took action from him to end my observation. When he handed me a damp sock I'd left in the laundry cart. His caretaker admonished for taking the cart without asking --- I told her not to worry, since my laundry was nearly dry. He needs to learn, she said.

His words were thick with shyness and from under-utilization of his vocal cords. Except when he sang. I told her that the man didn't need to be put on the spot; my melancholy would turn to rage if anyone laughed at him. But he sang clearly and without a hitch, breezing through a song I didn't know that came back to the line "Look at what the world has done for me."

In his case, life had recently done wonders. It took him a year-and-a-half to learn that song and others, but he enunciated clearly when singing. Before, she said, he was non-verbal, rarely left his room and would shudder at the touch of other people. It turned his caretaker was a neighbor working pro bono. She wouldn't take credit for the progress he made, saying he had done all the heavy lifting.

I thanked him for singing for me, and he shook my hand, offering me a spirited if garbled, "You're welcome." At 41, the man had expanded his world radically, especially for autism, which can leave people disconnected from the outside world.

My own brother turned 30 this year, and lives a similar life, cloistered in his room of old Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and Disney records, with rows of musical bears lining his shelves. It's Joe's refuge the one place in the world absent of hostile forces.

Yet in seeing this man, who had gone from non-verbal and disinterested in the surrounding world to singing and talking, I couldn't help but wonder ... is it too much of a stretch to say Joe couldn't show similar progress? Possibly or probably not. But from one autistic man at the laundromat, I saw a bloom of hope.

The rain had stopped an hour before I hustled my basked to the car. Yet driving home, my eyes were still wet.