The Max Rules

            If life is a card game and we are the cards, Max is beyond a wild card.  He’s a card we’ve never seen before. The game is figuring out how he plays – how he fits with the other cards.  

            A late afternoon in June, a time to relax on the patio: Max rides the bicycle in circles around the driveway.  Victoria the six-year-old rides the adult tricycle.  Too tall to sit on the seat, she stands on the pedals and follows Max until he makes an unpredictable turn and there’s a near crash.  Two little girls from next door join the fun: Gwen, another six-year-old, climbs in the basket on the back of the tricycle and makes it even harder for Victoria’s underpowered legs. Morgan, the fourth grader and Queen of C-A-T, dribbles the basketball and dodges the cycles.  Cleo the Dog nods in the clover and keeps a nervous eye on the motions.

            Max, our 29-year-old, developmentally delayed, mysterious wild card, is an incomplete master of the bicycle.  Balance, steering and pedaling are good, but braking is primitive – dragging feet or swerving in a split second.  Squealing, yelling and barking ratchet up the fun.

            We tolerate the chaos because Max the motion seeking wild card seldom has opportunities to play with the commonly known cards – the sixes, the eights, the tens.  His behavior is too exotic.  Communication requires intuition.  As a wilder than wild card, he makes all the rules.

            Since she was four years old, Victoria has been living with Max.  He fits snugly into her deck of cards. Now a six, she’s as good as the Ace of Spades. Finally, after a year of watching Max from their backyard, Gwen and Morgan have been lured into the game.  They like the big tricycle, the basketball goal, the swing, the climbing wall, and a bucketful of whiffle balls and bats.  Like most young children, they spent days staring in amazement at this grown boy who seems like a little child.  They are timid. Cleo the Dog is big and jumpy. Previously they only played with a few known cards. Now, their deck has expanded. They can play by the Max rules.

            The occasion makes Mom and Dad happy. 

            Step back from the game and consider the mystery card – a very little boy in a very big body – a brain that seizes, lungs that wheeze, eyes that never look at what they perceive and other body systems that work on a varied schedule. Vulnerable to diseases unidentified and unnamed.  Talents that fly undetected. Hands that pitch and catch from vision’s periphery. Ears sensitive to notes and keys missed. A contagious laugh for jokes and rhymes that never grow old.

            Life is just a metaphor. God speaks from the burning bush. Trumpets bring down the walls of Jehrico. Odysseus communes with the spirit of his deceased mother. Jesus walks on water, casts out demons and Thomas touches the nail-scarred hands. The sun, the moon and all plants and animals are filled with spirits.

            Too many of us fail to live the metaphors or understand them. Thus is Max’s purpose.

            An instinctive hugger: On the Arkansas Queen we sit in the sun on the upper deck as Little Rock’s little skyline drifted past.  Max gets out of his seat, steps behind us and gives an elderly black man the unexpected hug. I’m sorry, I say, he doesn’t know any better. That’s okay, he says, we all need more hugs.

            The unknown man plays the cards he is dealt.