I have noticed that Anthony sometimes seems to display more awareness than at other times.  It could be my imagination, of course.  But I mostly see it when he is angry.  That doesn't mean I always see it when he is angry; just that, when I do see it, it is usually at those times.

So I was trying at times this week to talk to Anthony as a normal person--asking him how he felt, explaining things, et cetera.  My wife figuratively raised her eyebrows when I did, but I pressed on.

Well, when I took him out in the car with me to go to a home improvement store--and part of the problem might be that I had him sit in the front with me rather than relegating him to the back where, even if he gets upset, he usually hits parts of the car rather than those in front of him--I realized I again had an opportunity to try to engage him.  This turned out to be one of the worst judgmental errors I have committed with him.

I asked him how he was doing.  I asked him what he thought about the sheep we saw out the window.  It was my mistake to point in the direction of the sheep.  Anthony thinks that our pointing to something means that he has to touch or pick up something in that direction.  So I told him that, no, I did not need him to adjust the air vents, but that began to agitate him.

I then noticed that he had multiple mosquito bites from our previous evening watching the local symphony at an outdoor venue.  Where most of us can resist the urge to scratch very much, Anthony of course will exacerbate the problem, so he had (and still has) large red blotches all over his arms and feet--he was wearing flip-flops because he had removed the shoestrings from his sneakers, and I didn't have time to re-lace them before we went out.  So I started pointing to and touching his arms to ask about his mosquito bites.  This made him even more agitated, and he started trying to poke, pinch, and hit my hand with his head.

If the weather were cooler, I would have left him in the car while I went into the store, but the mid-90's we are experiencing made that an impossibility.  So, I took him into the store and hoped for the best.

I went to the service counter to return some items I had bought.  Anthony was still attempting to dig his nails into my arms and otherwise engage me.  I did what I could to keep him calm while the store clerk processed my refund, but it wasn't a simple process and Anthony got further upset, lowering his head to try to hit my elbow.  As I again tried to keep him quiet without putting him into a headlock, he backed up and yelled at the top of his voice.  Naturally, everyone within hearing range looked over to see what the commotion was.  I smiled weakly and apologized to the clerk.  She sympathetically said something along the lines of, "No, it's all right," and did what she could to hurry the transaction through.

We finished there and walked through the store to complete my business there.  While Anthony continued for a while to try to hit or otherwise hurt me, I was able to divert or engage him sufficiently to prevent another outburst.

Ultimately, this is sad to me--and not because of this experience, embarrassing though it was.  What grieves me is acting on the occasional flash of seeming cognition from him--allowing for a moment my hopes to grow--and being swiftly brought back to earth to remember precisely what it is that we have in Anthony.  I'm not sure how many more attempts I will make in the future, regardless of what indications I might believe I see.