Small Talk

I braved our spring blizzard this morning to go to Target. Thanks to our Vegas vacation, we were not only out of groceries, but we hadn’t yet procured any of the supplies needed to play Easter bunny on Sunday. Other than being especially easy because my husband was home with the kids, the shopping portion of the trip was uneventful. Then I got to the checkout.

“You’re doing your Easter shopping late,” the cashier, an awkward white male in his early twenties, said as he bagged my Cadbury eggs. I gave him a polite smile and shrug. He continued with “You didn’t want to get it done earlier?”

Well, yes, I wanted to start months ago by compiling a collection of toys small enough to fit inside plastic eggs and then going to a gourmet chocolatier to have special chocolate bunnies crafted in the likenesses of both of my boys…but then I remembered that Easter is virtually meaningless since we don’t subscribe to organized religion and my boys would be just as happy with M&Ms and a copy of “101 Dalmations.” And by the way, you clearly don’t have kids, so shut up.

I did not say any of this, of course. Instead, I smiled politely and made it through the rest of the transaction in silence until he did the obligatory, “Do you want to save 10 percent today?” To which I quickly replied – as I always do – “No, thanks, we already have a Target card.”

His reply: “Well then you should have used it.” Perhaps in response to my look of shock, he then added, “You could have earned 180 points.”

Asperger’s, is what I thought. This guy clearly has Asperger’s syndrome. Asperger’s is the highest functioning end of the autism spectrum – to oversimplify, it basically means that social skills don’t come naturally to individuals who have it. Though Owen isn’t officially diagnosed with it (his diagnosis fell slightly below Asperger’s, under the straight-up “autism” criteria), I often think his behaviors, paired with his exceptional intelligence, make it a more fitting diagnosis.

I find myself making Asperger’s diagnoses a lot when I meet socially awkward individuals – men, mostly. I also often wonder whether they know they have it.

True, my unscientific assessments might not always be accurate, but with the rates of autism spectrum disorders in Minnesota being calculated at 1 in every 81 children (the highest of any state), I’m probably not always off base either. And really, I’d rather just give these guys the benefit of the doubt by assuming that rather than being rude, they are just trying to navigate the complicated terrain of small talk. I hope that when Owen gets older, people will do the same for him.