Asher didn’t talk a lot, back when he was six.
There were several reasons for that. The most obvious was a condition called oral dyspraxia, which meant he had difficulty controlling the movement of the muscles in his mouth and couldn’t make many speech sounds. The next was what the experts regarded as a more generalised problem mastering the whole concept of speech and language as a means of communicating.
There was a third reason, but it would be a year or two before I started to work that one out.
Anyhow, the upshot of all that was that when Asher did attempt to speak unprompted, I knew he had something important to say, and would listen carefully.
To be honest, I was paying this member of my class particularly close attention. After all, he was the kid who had told me we’d made a ‘deal’ to work together during this lifetime and that he remembered making those plans with me before he was born.
It was the end of the school day. My ten little pupils were all brought to our specialist speech and language class by taxi. Most of them lived many miles away. Each afternoon I’d walk them round to the front of the school and wait for their escorts to collect them and take them to the taxis. On this particular day, Asher was the last child left with me.
Noticing that we were alone, he looked up into my face. He used the few sounds at his disposal, along with some of the Makaton sign language we’d been learning, to say this:
“Now you big… and I little.”
I agreed that this was certainly true. Asher’s eyes sparkled and he was giggling at something.
“But one day…” he said, and left his sentence unfinished.
“You mean one day you’ll be taller than me?” I asked.
He laughed. It was a very expressive laugh — one that seemed to say, ‘You don’t know the half of it.’
I wanted to ask what he was trying to explain, but he probably wouldn’t have had the vocabulary to tell me, and in any case his taxi escort arrived just then, apologising that they’d been caught in traffic.
I’ve often wondered just how far into the future Ash had been looking that day. Had he foreseen this time, when he would be the teacher and I the student?
I suspect he had. I also suspect that’s why this very short conversation has stayed in my mind for over 25 years.