A Boy of Many Talents

My six-year-old son has a condition that is at once very strange and also very common among young boys: he can’t walk normal.

In fact, it is a rare sighting—like seeing a snow leopard—to watch my son take a bland, unoriginal step. And it’s quite obvious that he has no desire to engage in standard pedestrian locomotion.

Instead, he is a constant, tightly bound flow of energy that somehow transfers him from here to there. It’s like watching a Broadway show; sometimes you’re like, “What? What is he doing?”

Here are some of the ways he conveys from one place to the next:

• He runs, then stumbles, then runs more
• He leaps forward, over and over again
• He skips, of course
• He walks backwards
• He runs backwards
• He walks sideways
• He runs sideways
• He falls, gets up, falls again, gets up, and so on
• He walks on his knees
• He runs forward, but turns his torso backward to say something to his father, and then, shifting quickly, he turns his torso forward and starts running backward
• He careens, bent at the waist, especially when climbing and descending stairs
• He bursts forth at a sprint, and to stop himself he slides on his knees, like he is a performer who has come to the end of a vaudeville show—big finish! (This is usually how he ends up at our front door.)
• He staggers and veers sharply left, then right, nearly toppling over the entire way. (He usually does this when walking close to traffic, so that his father spends his entire time planning to dive in front of an oncoming car to save him.)
• He climbs anything, as long as he is not walking
• He progresses forward through a series of movements and gestures outlined above that, when seen all at once, are quite challenging for the human mind to understand

And on those rare occasions when he walks normal, he complains that he is tired. He can’t simply walk for more than twenty paces without exhausting himself, which is scientifically remarkable, as he clearly expends more energy when he chooses one of the unusual ways listed above.