I stumbled across this story in the St. Petersburg Times the other day and it’s been haunting me ever since…

The girl in the window

The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child’s face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

And lost forever she would have been had someone not finally called the police.  We’ve all heard one or more variations on this story before haven’t we?  Someone finally walks in the door and finds not so much a home as an indoor landfill…

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver’s door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I’ve ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I’ve been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There’s just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

And in a small room, about the size of a walk-in closet, they found the little girl.  She was almost seven years old, and had never been outside.  She was malnourished and anemic.  She made no eye contact, spoke not a word, only occasional grunts.  Yet battery of tests showed there was nothing physically wrong with her brain.  Brain scans, vision, hearing and genetics tests found nothing medically wrong with her. She was not deaf.  She not autistic.  She had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.  She was aware of her surroundings, yet utterly unable to relate to them, or to the people around her.  It was as if, no matter where they took her, she was still alone in the small room she had grown up in.  When nurses inserted an intravenous feeding tube into her, the needle penetrating her skin elicited no response.

The romantic image of the human infant left abandoned in the wilderness, raised only by animals, makes for some great fantasy.  Tarzan.  Mowgli.  Here’s the reality.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle’s almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Armstrong called the girl’s condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn’t even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

The human consciousness is not a blank slate.  But the pull instinct has on it is subtle.  We are not born with the knowledge we need for life.  We are born with a ravenous curiosity that drives us to learn.  We are not born knowing how to relate to our own kind.  What we are is born with is a hunger for contact.  The ancient legacy of all those who came before us in the chain of life can only take us so far.  The newborn mind immediately sets out on the rest of the journey to the human status, hungrily absorbing everything it can see and hear and touch, calling out to the world in blurps and grunts and howls and giggles, digesting the response it gets back.  And when there is no response, It simply fills itself up with its own internal chatter, and that becomes the child’s world.

Dani, the girl in this story, was placed in foster care, and eventually found a loving family willing to do the hard work of taking care of her.   There is hope that she may learn to take care of herself one day, but it is a constant fight now, against the internal world her mind had to construct for itself…

Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.

"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani’s fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.

Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.

Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn’t know she has to blow out air to make the noise.

She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.

She’s lost inside herself. Again.

But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher’s expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands…

For the rest of her life it is going to be a fight with that internal world because she can just disappear into it in the blink of an eye and will, repeatedly, because it is more familiar to her then the real world outside of her skin, because it is more real, because it loved her first. 

And reading about Dani’s struggle, I think I understand something about myself a little better.  The shyness.  The nearly debilitating shyness. It’s not that I’m afraid of people.  Oh contraire…people fascinate me no end.  And I love companionship.  I need company.  Lots of it.  But…I just don’t know how to get it.  I don’t know how to approach people.  That’s what I’m afraid of.  Not people, but…weirdly…socializing with them.  I’m lost when it comes to that.  Absolutely lost.

The home I grew up in couldn’t have been more the opposite of Dani’s.  We were low budget, but I never went to bed hungry.  My clothes were mostly second hand, but I never walked out the door in them dirty.  I had all the hugs I could ever have wanted.  I never doubted I was loved.  I had some toys, not many but enough to engage my imagination.  And books.  They had me reading before I’d even entered first grade.  There was family, there was our little concrete block and folding chairs Baptist church.  There were all the adults on our block of little apartments that kept an eye on me as I played in the little back yard.  Mom took me everywhere she went just about, except of course to work.  She took me shopping with her, to the museums and movies.  Her and her church friends took me on outings in the country.  We went on vacation every year to the seashore, where I would wander around under mom’s careful eye, picking up seashells and building sand castles.  My world, before I’d ever entered first grade, was full of all kinds of fascinating, absorbing, curious things. 

Except for one thing.  And I’m only just now really realizing it.  There were no children like me.  That I didn’t get until we moved to a new set of apartments out in Maryland, because mom didn’t want me going to school in the neighborhood where I’d been a toddler.  We moved from a tiny apartment in Washington D.C. to a much nicer one in the county.  Now I had a big field of grass out back to play in.  And a tiny forest of my very own.  And a creek.  And a little playground.  And…there were other children.  Lots of other children.  Some my own age, some slightly older.  And about a month later, there came my first day in school, and I found myself swimming in a sea of other kids my own age. 

And that was when things became…difficult.  And the more difficult they became, the more pleasure I found in my books, and drawing, and my toys, and all the imaginary worlds I’d created for myself when I was living in that other neighborhood, because there was no one else to play with.

If you’d asked me just last week if I’d had the company of other kids in my life growing up I’d have instantly said yes.  But those were my school years I would have been remembering.  It never occurred to me to look again at the little bit of life I can recall before that first day of school.  And now that I think of it…no.  There were absolutely no kids in my life back then.  I am not kidding.  There were none.  Plenty of caring, loving adults.  Lots of affection.  Tons of human interaction.  They took me places.  They read to me.  They hugged me.  They cared for me.  But…there were no other kids.  I played alone, in my own imaginary worlds back then.  And when I suddenly found myself surrounded by other kids, I played by myself most of the time.  That was, I told myself in later years, because I got bullied a lot.  Which was true enough.  But I was painfully shy.  Meeting new people in a purely social setting has always been an enormously stressful thing for me.  I can do it in a business setting, no problem.  I can do it when there is some larger context I can relate to.  But to just walk into a room and socialize stresses me out to the point of immobility.  I just want to run away.  And when I can’t, I withdraw into the world inside my head.

And I still am.  And to this day, I find myself popping back into the world inside my head whenever I’m stressing out.  Until I read Dani’s story, I’d never given that the slightest bit of thought, other then to acknowledge that I have a very active imagination.  And imagination, I tell myself, is a good thing.  And, it is.  My ability to construct things inside my head and work with them as though they were real is what makes me a good programmer.  That I can’t actually See a program running, but only it’s output, has never once fazed me.  I can easily visualize the flow of a program in my head.  I don’t have to see gears and wheels turning to understand how it works.  I can disappear into algorithms for hours at a stretch, refining them to an elegant perfection.  It is a pure pleasure.  And it makes me a very good living.  I draw this way too.  I almost never do preliminary sketches on paper.  I sketch a thing in my head for hours, until I know how I want it to look on paper.  Then I pick up the pencil.

But sometimes I don’t bother.  Often…all too horribly often…just having created it in my head is satisfying enough.  My series, A Coming Out Story, is like that.  I have it mostly all scripted out…in my head.  And I can spend hours looking at it, and enjoying it…chuckling to myself over and over again at certain passages…refining it a tad here and there.  Getting it out has been a real struggle though, and that’s not all because it represents a stressful time in my life.  Sometimes, the world inside my head is a lot more fun then then world beyond.  I have to struggle sometimes to place myself, firmly, solidly, in that other, Real world.

I have been told, over and over again, by longtime friends, that part of the problem I have socializing may be that I spend too much time inside myself.  But it’s not entirely that.  I just don’t know how to approach people.  I keep drawing a blank.  Now for the first time in my life I’m really looking back at that period just before my first day of school, when I had no one else my own age to play with, and I’m wondering. 

So…I’m still chewing on it.  More later…

[Edited a tad…]