I have a serious question to ask you from the deep recesses of my mother’s heart.

Does your child ever strikingly remind you of Rainman, Forest Gump, and Steve Irwin, all within a span of 15.8 minutes?

I remember the second time I watched Rainman. It was years after its original release, but before Tom Cruise started jumping on celebrity couches, which means it’s safe to actually admit you enjoyed a Tom Cruise film. Anything after the whole Oprah couch debacle/Brooke Shields PPD conflict and you must scorn his talent and hate every movie he is in or lose face with all your friends.

At the time of my 2nd viewing of Rainman, I had a preschool-aged son I didn’t know what the hell to do with.  I bawled and bawled during that movie because I could see my son in so many of Rainman’s behaviors.

The freaking the fuck out over loud noises, the insistence on certain clothing, but the uncanny ability to recall certain information.  The meltdowns if we missed The Crocodile Hunter, the withdrawal from my touch. And when I say withdrawal, know I mean my attempts to comfort him with a hug when he was upset sent him into a SHIT-THROWING, SCREAMING CHIMPANZEE FIT OF RAGE.

(By the way, I also bawled during the scene in that Ya-Ya movie where Ashley Judd is in her room, losing her shit because she can’t take her kids for one more second and she up and leaves them.  After having chimpanzee shit thrown at you for a few years, you’d relate to that scene a little too much, too.)

But thankfully, Payton has outgrown all of those behaviors.  Well, mostly. They aren’t completely gone, but they are much more in the oh, this is just quirky! range. Except for one, and thank god it isn’t the chimpanzee shit-throwing one.

You know when Tom Cruise would ask Raymond a question and Raymond would answer “yeah” but without ever looking Tom in the eye? Do you remember the way Raymond would say “yeah”?

Payton does the exact same thing. I mean he sounds exactly like Raymond, the same tone, same pitch, and he’s never looking at me when he does that. Now don’t go putting your armchair diagnostic panties on because A) you’ll be wasting your breath on me and if I haven’t run off all of the armchair diagnosticians from my blog yet then SHOO! and B) it isn’t often he does this. It’s pretty darn rare that he does, but when he does, my god, the boy sounds just like Dustin Hoffman!

Does that happen to anyone else?

And then there’s Forest Gump, another idiot savant character who reminds me of my son.  Remember the way Forest sits on a bench, with his back ramrod straight, hands on his knees? Payton does the same thing.  The only thing missing from an exact reenactment is the tilting of his head to the left. Instead, Payton will sometimes lift his left butt cheek to fart, and, my god, the boy looks just like his mother!

There’s also another resemblance between Payton and Forest – the blank look Forest would get on his face when someone tried to explain why he couldn’t do one socially odd thing or another.  Payton nails it too.  Let me tell you, it takes real talent to plaster your face with a WHAT THE FUCK? look while maintaining a complete air of innocence. I don’t know how he and Tom Hanks figured out to do it, but daaammmn, TALENT!  I could fool so damn many people if I could hide my snarkiness like that.

Looking back, I now understand that the toddler meltdowns he had if we missed The Crocodile Hunter were not because of some inability to cope with schedule changes. Oh no.  It’s because I was interfering with THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIS ART, GODDAMN IT, WOMAN!

We took a trip to New Orleans today where we spent most of the afternoon at The Audobon Zoo.  We happened to arrive when they were doing an elephant show and taking questions from the visitors.  Of course, Payton’s hand shot up in the air in a nanosecond.

I cringed because Payton has a tendency to ask questions regarding animal sex and gender.  In fact, he thinks he’s a damn expert on the subject. And of course, Payton wanted to know how you tell a female elephant from a male elephant, even to the point of asking a follow-up question of how the gender difference applied to Asian vs. African elephants.

(Frankly, I can’t even remember there are the two different types.)

After all of the elephant gender is cleared up, we head down to the tiger and lion exhibits.  While viewing the lions, another family with young children approach the viewing area.  I could read Payton’s mind….YOUNG, IGNORANT CHILRENZ I CAN IMPRESS WITH MY MAD ANIMAL GENDER DIFFERENTIATING SKILLS!

And so Professor Payton launches into a lecture of how you can tell a female lion from the male…

“That lion right there,” he said as he points to the lion, “is the female lion. ‘Female’ is another word for woman.  Female lions do all the grocery shopping.”

No kidding, it’s like a comedy act and sex education class all rolled into one.  It’s quite brilliant, actually, the way Payton, who is only eight, figured out how to explain to a 4-5 year old that the female lion does all the hunting.  He’s breaking it down to their level. What do preschoolers know of hunting for prey? Moms provide food from the grocery store!

And by the way, the entire time he’s telling this, he in no way looks un-animated like Forest Gump (though he insists on buttoning the nerdy top button of his polo no matter how I beg and plead), and in no way sounds monotonic like Raymond.

In fact, he sounds and acts exactly like Steve Irwin, only replace the Australian accent with a Southern one.  If you ever get a chance to hear Payton’s organic declaration of “what a beauty!” when he sees an animal he loves, or tries to calm a frightened animal with “I’m not gonna hurtcha,” or yells  “woohoo!” out of sheer exhilaration with an animal, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

I’m not sure what you get when you subtract the idiot from the savant and add a handsome, talented conservationist with a knack for showmanship, but damned if I can’t wait to find out in 20 years.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 1:00 am and is filed under Gifted Children. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.