6

School Daze

A lot of kids with Asperger’s and autism want to make friends. We all want to make friends. We all want to have friends. It is hard for me to start. Like, what do I say to you? Will you laugh or look at me funny when I say something? What can I say that will make you want to be my friend? Will you like me? Or think I’m weird because of some of the things I do? What if I surf but you don’t? Or you work on cars and I don’t?

 

It’s hard for me to figure out how to be someone’s friend. I always think people are looking at me like I’m this freak, because maybe I don’t talk to them right away. I have to know you before I really talk to you, and then, sometimes, I still don’t want to talk. But we can hang out, drive around.

 

You grow up used to being alone, which sucked for me, but now as I get older, it’s where I want to be most of the time, even though I have friends I can call to surf, play basketball, or hang out. But when I was in school, it really sucked. The teachers thought I was retarded or something too. So that’s why I always had my one friend, and then my surfing friends. I’d find my one friend, and that would be my friend for the whole year.

 

Clay’s amateur career continued to escalate. He traveled to California, South Africa, and the other Hawaiian Islands, sometimes missing school to go on trips. He wanted to surf even more and sacrifice school to make that happen. Especially after sixth grade, the last time he liked anything about school.

Jill transferred Clay back to Sacred Heart, where he’d spent kindergarten, because his fifth-grade teacher at Kam III was an old-school traditionalist who had no idea how to deal with Clay’s slower processing, different way of learning, and constant need to move around.

“They’d punish him, keep him out of PE, if he was wiggling,” Jill remembers. “Clay excelled in PE, and still did well in writing and art. But I was really struggling to have him do okay in school. He had a one-on-one person who would take him out to work with him that he liked, but his actual teacher in class kept punishing him by taking away things that were comfortable for him. I talked to the principal and said, ‘Look, you can’t keep putting Clay in the corner like that. His self-esteem is going to go down the tubes. All he’s doing is wiggling.’ So they’d give him a ball of Silly Putty . . . it was a matter of constantly making him fit.

“So finally, I pulled him out in the middle of the year. I was frustrated: a very academic teacher was trying to make him more academic, instead of working with him. I asked so many times for the school to put him with a teacher that would fit him.”

Unfortunately, public schools don’t often work that way.

All of his teachers to date had cited the same issue: an inability to pay attention in the classroom. Jill tried everything from Brain Game hookups to green algae to find the magic bullet to improve his focus and create a better mind-set for learning. Little worked. While teachers and school psychologists pointed to ADD, suggested he had learning disabilities, or came to other common conclusions, Jill worried it was something beyond that, something beyond the school’s ability to recognize.

Clay saw it another way. “I sometimes had trouble paying attention because I just didn’t want to be there,” he says. “Give me an ocean and some waves, or something I like, and I will pay attention all the time. Mom really wanted me to fit in and tried everything to make it happen.”

“I just wanted to know he was normal and could conform,” Jill explains. “Now I see that was not a good way to think. I needed to dig deeper and look for more options than trying to fit a square into a round hole. I needed to appreciate the square and do what I could to figure out how to make him more comfortable. If I only knew then what I know now, it would have been so much more gentle and positive for Clay.”

By fifth grade, the countless tests Clay had undergone had further diminished his interest in school and increased the negativity other students directed toward him; didn’t he already stick out enough as a haole boy in an outer island school? Why bother showing up when you’re just going to be hauled out of the classroom for more tests? “When you get pulled out of classrooms, the other kids look at you funny, like you’re a freak,” Clay says. “I can still see some of their looks.”

The testing went on. When Clay was in fifth grade, school psychologist Ellen Kerringer diagnosed him with ADD for the second time. She also concluded that he suffered from overanxiety, which is common in “slow-processing” kids who think everyone else is aware of their every move (a perception Clay still has). Years before, Jill had taken Cheyne to Dr. Kerringer because he’d had trouble from not spending more time with his biological father, Tony Magnusson. The only time they saw each other was during Cheyne’s summer vacations, when the boy flew to California. Even though Gino had assumed the father’s role for Cheyne and gave him the two-parent upbringing every child craves, Cheyne’s separation anxiety was strong. He’d started to think Gino preferred Clay to him, adding to a family dynamic already strained by the parents’ differences of opinion on how to help Clay move forward.

During one visit, Dr. Kerringer saw Clay in the waiting room jumping around and fidgeting. She told Jill, “He’s going to be in here too.”

When Dr. Kerringer suggested prescription drugs, Jill went against her own instincts and revisited the idea. She approached Clay. “Clay, if you could take a pill that would help you feel better and make it easier for school, would you want to try it?”

He looked her right in the eyes. “Yes.”

“He wanted to be good, and do good. He also wanted me to be happy,” she says.

It didn’t work. Not only that, Ritalin proved to be a disaster. “He took it, and it was awful,” she recalls. “He was screaming profanities . . . he became this kid from hell. In four or five days . . . I cannot tell you how bad of an effect it had on him. It was definitely not the drug of choice.”

“My friends and I were into things like surfing and video games and watching DVDs and listening to music on our MP3s and ­going home from school and watching reruns of movies and all these cool new fun things you could do . . . a couple of them even had pagers. Then iPods. That’s what I paid attention to,” Clay says. “I didn’t like crowded classrooms. I paid attention to the things that interested me.”

Then there was the fifth-grade teacher who had little use for inattentive students. The underlying reason for Clay’s difficulty became clear in the coming years, but no one at the time could identify it. Thus, the fifth-grade teacher saw him as a dumb, lazy, troublemaking surfer boy. “The fifth-grade teacher treated him like a delinquent, even though he wasn’t blurting out, disrupting the class, talking to his friends in class, or hurting anyone,” Jill remembers. “He just wasn’t processing like the others. The school should have paid attention to how different Clay was and not put him with a strict, inflexible teacher. Finally, I took him out the middle of the year.”

 

Another ongoing issue was Clay’s difficulty in forming friendships or focusing his energy on several kids simultaneously. He couldn’t do it. He would identify one friend, preferably someone whom he could influence and even control to a degree. That boy remained his social rock, his consistent go-to person, throughout the school year. During the next term, he might retain that friendship—or form another. This pattern continued through Clay’s elementary and middle school years, but it had a parallel current that, as behavioral counselor Carolyn Jackson pointed out, put Clay in a better position than most of those with Asperger’s or autism enjoy: his much broader cast of surfing friends.

“I had the one friend who I would always hang out with,” Clay recalls. “In fifth and sixth grades, that was Jack Pope and Granger Larsen. I also had my surfing friends, and since we were all really good [competitors], a lot of the kids in school liked us in that way. School kids always like the sports guys. I have friends that have lasted all the way until now.”

Clay’s sixth-grade teacher, Mary Anna Waldrop Enriquez, took it upon herself to study the way he interacted with others in what became her quest to figure out how to free Clay’s mind. “He would play with other kids,” she says. “He would go out to recess with them when I wasn’t keeping him in to finish an assignment. He was pretty funny. The kids protected him. There were about three boys, kids like Jack Pope, that would protect him. They would make sure he was okay—especially Jack. Clay would go along with them. He never got in fights. He would never, ever volunteer to do anything. He would follow along. When it came to conversing, he was more nonverbal.”

“What I knew of Clay that always worked in his benefit was that he has friends,” Carolyn Jackson says. “Many Asperger’s children and adults, their greatest difficulty in life is that they crave friendship but they don’t know how to do friendship. Because Clay grew up with young people who loved to surf, they became their own group. He was always a part of a group. I believe that being a part of a group, even with all the psychological difficulties he has had due to his Asperger’s, was one of his saving graces.

“A lot of his friends are the ‘who’s who’ of surfing, and they have great respect for Clay, so when they would go out, he was invited. While watching him, what I was clear about was that another Asperger’s child would be by themselves, but Clay would not be. People are still around him. That is the unconscious net that he has. He never has to isolate like others with Asperger’s.”

When Clay talks about finding it relatively easy to meet people but always difficult to build friendships from those encounters, it’s clear he has put considerable thought into the matter. “A lot of kids with Asperger’s and autism want to make friends. We all want to make friends. We all want to have friends,” Clay says. “It is hard for me to start. Like, what do I say to you? Will you laugh or look at me funny? What can I say that will make you want to be my friend? Will you like me? Or think I’m weird because of some of the things I do? What if I surf but you don’t? It’s hard for me to figure out how to be someone’s friend. I have friends I can call anytime to surf, play basketball, or hang out.”

He has also developed some idiosyncrasies to compensate for or mask his discomfort in certain environments—especially ones that include loud, sudden noises. When something strongly excites Clay or makes him happy, he responds to the surge of endorphins in his brain by rubbing his hands furiously—a gesture known to everyone who has ever met him. If the waves are up, if the food is good, or if he sees himself on video shooting out of a barrel, his hands start flying together like a mad mechanic scrubbing down with pumice stone. He’s been known to rub them for ten minutes at a time. Conversely, whenever he grows worried and anxious, he twirls strands of his hair and sometimes pulls it out. When he wants to get away from it all, he finds the family’s dog, Kalani, and plays with her, sometimes exchanging sounds. In her language. And there’s more. “When something really excites me, like a great movie scene or surf video, I might growl. If I don’t get what you’re saying, I’ll stare at you. Or stare into space. We all have our things. Everyone who knows me is used to them, so it’s no big deal.”

“My grandchildren would say to me, ‘You should’ve seen what Clay did today. You should’ve heard what he said!’” Carolyn Jackson says. “I was privy to that. Because Clay met these kids very young, nobody took offense to all of his idiosyncrasies. As far as they were concerned, ‘That’s just Clay.’”

 

Jill thought the latest troubles were behind them when Clay transferred back to Sacred Heart for the second half of fifth grade. Not so: he was placed in a classroom with another hard-edged teacher.

“She would joke with kids in an inappropriate way—especially for a Catholic school,” Jill says. “One day Clay pushed someone who had pushed him. The teacher asked him, ‘Clay, if someone told you to put a firecracker up your butt, would you do it?’ Another time she said, ‘Clay, are you gay?’ Then, at Mass, when they got up to take communion, Clay followed along and took communion too. The only problem is that Clay is not Catholic. That fact never would have entered his mind. After he took the wafer, he turned around, chewing it, opened his mouth, and showed everyone else. The priest pulled him into the office and told him he’s going to hell for that. To this day he still thinks he’s going to hell for doing that. Sad that someone would say that to him.

“Well, like I said before, Clay never shakes off the bad things—they are always right with him.”

 

The downhill streak of poor teacher-student dynamics turned around suddenly when Clay entered sixth grade, just as Jill was beginning to entertain the thought of home-schooling him. In that classroom he met the teacher who, as time now shows, would become one of the greatest benefactors of his life—just as he would become an unspoken inspiration in hers.

Mary Anna Waldrop Enriquez arrived at Sacred Heart by way of the ocean. Even though that sounds mystical even for an island chain that still has adherents to the ancient, sea-based Huna religion, her path to Maui deeply involves the sea. After growing up in New Mexico, earning her teaching and special education credentials, and then teaching in California, she sailed throughout the Pacific for seven years with her husband, visiting or living briefly in Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, the Polynesian islands, and Mexico. Then her husband died suddenly. Unsure of how to move forward, she found Maui. She took a job teaching sixth-grade writing at Sacred Heart, which turned out to be a great gift for Lahaina as a community, for the students, and especially for the Marzo family.

Enriquez started at the elementary school in 1999, but moved in 2003 to the middle school, where she continues to teach, primarily the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). She uses writing to further students’ comprehension. More significantly for the Marzos, she is the most knowledgeable educator in Maui when it comes to autism.

“As life goes, the winds change,” Enriquez says. “Sacred Heart School found me. Lahaina is such a tiny community; every school is its own little house on the prairie. A job was created for me.”

The first time Enriquez laid eyes on Clay, she knew right away he was different from the other kids. “I thought I knew a lot about special education, but it was limited to what we knew about brain science at the time. So Clay comes in, and I just wanted to peel him back, to find out, What are you thinking? because I’d never had an autistic child before. And no one knew he was autistic, that he had Asperger’s; that diagnosis came later. He was brand-new to me.

“In my twelve years of primary schooling, I had never had an autistic classmate. In college, it wasn’t even touched upon in my special ed classes. Never touched upon. Now, one of the things I make a point of doing is to go to every single conference on brain research that I can get to—in Honolulu, Houston, San Francisco, or wherever. What’s the latest brain research? I want to know—and I can feel Clay in the back of my mind, pushing me on.”

While her basic knowledge of autism was limited in 2000–2001, she knew instinctively to tread differently with Clay if she wanted results from him in her writing class. “I knew that if I called on him in class, I’d just get an outer-space look,” she says. “Even though everyone knew he was a bit different by then, I didn’t want to put him on the spot. I never asked him to give an oral report or recite poetry. I did at first, but after one or two times it was like, ‘Okay, we’re not going to put him up in front, up on stage.’”

When Enriquez polled the veteran Sacred Heart teachers, she learned that there had been no previous students at the school with the same developmental and social challenges. Strangely enough, after a long history of having no students on the autistic spectrum, Sacred Heart now had two—both in sixth-grade writing.

“There was another kid in my class who was a little different, a girl,” Clay recalls. “She was like me—really into one thing, her one gift—but she was a lot different around people than me. She didn’t have any friends.”

“Yes, we had the girl Clay mentioned. She was like a young Temple Grandin,” Enriquez says, referring to the scientist who may be the world’s foremost writer on autism—and is autistic herself. “My other autistic student was so in-your-face, and it was just fascinating! Clay was the reserved one. He would just shut down and not do anything. Sometimes being in-your-face makes you realize more, so we concluded, ‘That’s who she is,’ and we let her go.

“Whereas with Clay I pushed, and I shouldn’t have. I’m just glad I was the encouraging kind of teacher, not the grumpy kind. I was like, ‘We’re gonna get this, we’re gonna get this,’ and keeping him after school . . . I look back on it now and go, Oh my God, beat me over the head. Don’t let me do that to another kid again.”

When Clay fell behind early in his writing assignments, Enriquez took quick action. Her decision to act immediately was vital: she understood that whereas most kids can right themselves from a laissez-faire, I-don’t-like-it-and-I-don’t-care attitude, such self-regulation was far more difficult for Clay. Long before she understood the neuroscience of autism, Enriquez knew that lagging students fall out of school not only because of their inability to do the work but also because of some educators’ reluctance to help them overcome the difficulty.

With Clay, she modified almost every writing assignment so that he could write about surfing, tapping directly into the creative vein that had gushed with gold when Clay wrote daily in his classroom journals a couple of years prior.

As she recalls her creative approach that triggered Clay’s innate writing talent, Enriquez twirls her long locks, sits back, and smiles, her bright, focused eyes beaming from a deeply tanned face. “If there was an expository essay, I’d say, ‘How do you catch a wave? I’ve never been on a board. Tell me how you’d do it.’ If it was a narrative, I’d say, ‘Write a story about your best barrel.’ If it had to do with parts of speech, I’d say, ‘Tell me all the verbs that have to do with surfing. Give me all the adjectives.’ And then the assignments would get completed.

“What was really cool about taking this approach with Clay is that surfing is so descriptive. It might be the most descriptive sport or lifestyle activity when it comes to figures of speech. The adjectives! The adverbs that support the adjectives! I could get really excited with him, because he would go into a different place. He was out on his board, on a wave. I was not there. He was completely comfortable talking to himself about what was happening. Many times, I wrote it down, handed it to him, and said, ‘This is what you said. Write this down. See if I got it right.’ He would transcribe what I’d written down into what he actually said, or meant to say, and that way we didn’t have to worry about the conventions of writing mechanics. He could just say what he wanted to say.”

She focused his assignments on one of her favorite subjects: direct relationships with the physical senses. “Taste was one, because I love eating almost as much as surfing,” Clay says. “I would write something about what I eat. One time she gave me a paper plate. In the places where each part of your meal would be, she had me write how it feeds me, in what way. I just drew pictures of the kind of food I wanted on that part of the plate and what I was hungry for, and I wrote a little story about it.”

“If you can articulate your relationship to your senses,” Enriquez explains, “no matter the observation or situation, you’re not only going to know yourself better, but also how and why you relate to your surroundings the way you do, and you’re also going to gain deeper insight and knowledge into any environment you become a part of . . . which, I feel, triggers our innate desire to always learn and grow.”

The impact of her teaching was not lost on her student. “She made me feel good about writing a lot on surfing and the ocean, because that is where I always want to go,” Clay notes. “She liked my writing too. It was the first time since Mrs. Akiyama that a teacher told me she really liked the work I did.”

The teacher’s intense devotion and dedication paid off. Clay moved through sixth grade with a 3.1 grade point average, easily his highest overall mark since second grade. The GPA came with a bit of an asterisk: Enriquez convinced his other teachers to modify their course work so as to draw on his strengths while minimizing his weaknesses. For instance, rather than read in front of the class, a situation that petrified him far more than paddling out in shark-infested waters, Clay would complete an assignment by writing an essay or book report. Almost always, he threaded surfing into the work.

“I kind of took him under my wing, maybe because the other teachers saw that I got him. Or, to be more accurate, I was closer to getting him than they were,” Enriquez says. “He’s not a failure, and there was no way I was going to let that kid get an F on his report card. He just learns differently. That’s on us, to learn how to connect with and bring out the best in these kids that learn differently. Why should he get an F? He got his three-point grade point average from me sitting with him after school, working with him, me saying, ‘You can head to the beach as soon as we’re done, but not until we’re done’—and him doing the work.”

As the serene Enriquez sips her coffee at a café not two hundred yards from the Marzo house, she closes her eyes, inhales deeply, and then reopens them. A deep focus emerges, rooted squarely in the larger picture of what Clay Marzo means to her, what she sees in him, how others can learn from his example, and how teaching him changed her approach to educating special needs students.

“He was poetic. There was a poetic quality to everything he saw, which makes sense, because he’s feeling it at his cellular level,” she says. “Most of us have to meditate and do deep visualization, or yoga postures and prayer, to reach the level he operates at all the time. Especially around water. It’s his makeup. Being able to describe anything in nature . . . he was like on the other side of the clouds, describing it. He was able to describe so deeply.

“The lens he looks through is 360 degrees. When he wrote, you weren’t going to get much punctuation, which would bother the heck out of the older, more traditional ‘it has to be perfect’ teachers, but he was describing everything as he felt it. He was looking through a very wide-angle lens. Art flows consistently throughout anything I teach and do, so with Clay, I got both well-chosen words and good drawings—usually of waves or ocean settings.”

She recalls her favorite day in the classroom with the immediacy of watching a touching movie play out. “It was after school one day. It was only the two of us in the room. It was one of those ‘tell me’ assignments. I can see Clay in front of me, but he’s gone, sitting on that board deep in his mind. He was able to describe the wave in a way where I had no idea that’s what it was like to be on top of the water. I remember that, at that moment, I wanted what he had. I wanted to get on a surfboard and feel what he had just described to me. But to him, I wasn’t there at all. He was just talking to himself.

“In class, he would rub his hands together or rub the desk, or trace surfing moves in the air with his hands. It took me a while to figure it out, but mentally, he was nowhere near the seat he was sitting in. He was gone, surfing that wave, being on the wave, while the rest of us thought we were watching a guy at his desk tracing swirls and curves in the air with his hand. When I watched this from the front of the room, I’m like, Okay, I’m not calling on Clay now. He has no idea where we are.”

She sits up straight, tucking her legs beneath the seat and folding her hands on top of the table. A broad smile fans across her face. “Do you know how amazing it must be to be that incredibly connected to what you love? Many of us never find out, not even for a minute or an hour. When it comes to surfing, he has that experience all the time.”

 

Not every day was rosy. Enriquez and Jill held meetings—and an occasional tug of war—concerning the best ways for Clay to learn and to progress through school. “Mom was always trying to figure out how to make things easier,” Clay remembers. “She felt comfortable talking with [Enriquez], who told me a lot how good I was doing.”

“Jill cried—a lot. She was just trying to find out what would work,” Enriquez explains. “She was just hoping this teacher would shed the light on ‘What’s wrong with my son? Why isn’t he learning like everyone else?’ It was painful for me to see a mom so attached that she’s going to make it right for her son. She went to the end, to the Amen Clinic in California, to UCLA . . . she was going to find out what was wrong. That’s why my heart goes out to her. She did find out.

“By the time Clay got to sixth grade, it was obvious academically and socially that he was very different. If we hadn’t done all of those accommodations, he would have flunked. And the social side? It was like, ‘Good morning, Bob.’ Blank. ‘Did you just hear me say good morning to you?’ He’s still looking at you. What’s the normal reaction? ‘God, kid, you are so rude!’ Yes, it was that obvious.

“I just hung in there with Jill, trying to find out a way to make it work. And sometimes she would beg us to make an accommodation for him. ‘Please, can you tell this social studies teacher not to make him read the chapter out loud and answer the seven questions? Could we let him do a project? Could we give him more time?’”

Not long ago, as Jill and a guest are dining at Betty’s Beach Café, an old seaside eatery on Lahaina’s north side known for its window views of passing sea turtles, the manatees of Hawaii—big, gentle, masterful in water, and on-again, off-again when relating to humans—she says, “Clay really loves them.” Then she hears a voice that makes her stop in mid-bite. She turns around to find Mary Anna Enriquez with several friends, all smiling at her. They greet each other, and as she finishes Jill puts her hand to her ear. “I’ll call you,” she mouths.

She turns to her guest, a smile on her face. “I love Mary Anna. What she did for Clay was so great, to see him for who he was and intuitively know how to work with an autistic kid, even though none of us knew. She was the one teacher in the middle of a bunch of really bad school experiences for Clay who took him in, figured out how to teach him, and positively reinforced him, again and again and again. And she did this while making him do the work. You know how hard it is to make Clay do anything he doesn’t want to do? She found a way. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.”

Unfortunately for Clay, his father holds a different view of the entire situation. As Clay recalls, “The more Mom took me around to get me tested and find out what was different or wrong with me, the more Dad thought nothing was wrong. He always thought I was okay and always asked me, ‘Why can’t you just sit still in school and learn like everyone else?’”

Gino didn’t ride Clay on everything. “I just wanted him to make enough effort to do okay in school. I didn’t need a straight-A kid like a lot of other parents. But I didn’t want one who didn’t try either. I kept telling Jill that he just needed to get it together, to toughen up and focus more in school.”

“Gino doesn’t like anything abnormal,” Jill says. “For him, it has to be normal. He liked that Clay was a surfer. ‘C’mon, boy, do good in surfing, do good in school, buckle down.’ That kind of guy. He probably thought I was crazy, but I was trying to figure out what to do. How do I help him help himself? How? It’s still a struggle.

“I think Gino was in denial. He didn’t go to any of the special ed meetings or parent-teacher conferences. He just gave Clay a lot of credit for surfing and was okay with mediocrity in school. ‘I got Cs in school—just get through school and you’ll be good.’ He wasn’t hands-on; he thought I was an enabler, making him a ‘mama’s boy.’ Then again, a lot of people have said that about me. They still do. I’m pretty sure I am, to some degree. I don’t want to be, but I don’t know what else to do.”

“I was so busy working, trying to make a living, that I didn’t pay attention to a lot of his little struggles in school,” Gino explains. “To me, he wasn’t failing out. It wasn’t a red flag. I thought he was like any other kid on Maui—‘let’s go surf and have fun and not worry about school.’ I understand. I was one of those kids who played around in the classroom and made jokes and laughed instead of listened.

“Then I started hearing that my kid’s got some weird difficulties in school. I had a hard time accepting the labels, the tests, and the explanations. I’m saying, ‘Clay, just pay attention!’ But everyone said he couldn’t; it was difficult for him to process. I never fully accepted that. It’s not like I wanted him to be an academic whiz. I was never the parent who pushed my kids to be a doctor, lawyer, or physicist. He’s going to be what he’s going to be. He’ll figure it out. That’s how I always saw Clay in school.”

One of those who watched the growing crossfire was the teacher. Enriquez heard all about the conversations, arguments, and differences of opinion between Clay’s parents from Jill—but never from Gino. “Gino knew I was Clay’s teacher for English, but never asked me, ‘How’s Clay doing?’ To me, as a teacher, it was bizarre that a parent wouldn’t want to know if everything’s okay in the class. ‘Is he doing okay? What does he do?’ He never wanted to know. He never asked.

“In some defense of Gino, there were teachers at our school who felt the same way: ‘He’s gotta grow out of it. Make him do it.’ That was pretty tough. Gino had no idea what was going on with Clay, certainly no knowledge of Asperger’s or autism, because none of us had made that particular correlation yet. I don’t think anyone on the island even knew what to look for. But my own colleagues showing such insensitivity to a student’s learning challenges? Well, it just spurred me on to pull Clay out of recess, get him back in class, and get him to finish that assignment.”

 

One autumn day a little more than a decade after he had last sat in Enriquez’s classroom, Clay stood on the staircase at Ironwoods, part of the Kapalua Resort. He was checking out the surf for a quick session in his usual manner—silently, alone, reading the winds, tides, and swell direction, clicking off his observations against the supercomputer of stored knowledge in his mind in order to answer one question: Do I want to paddle out?

As he scanned the sea, a benevolent face from the past approached him.

“I have another job as a wedding coordinator. Usually after school, in the evenings, I go to Ironwoods and have the wedding there,” Enriquez explains. “One night I was coming up the steps, and Clay is standing there. He’s standing at the steps in that quiet, Buddha stance he has, without a muscle flickering, just staring.”

He broke his intense concentration to look into her eyes and move aside. “Hey, Clay,” she said.

There was no discernible change in his facial expression. “But in his eyes, there was this sweet little smile,” Enriquez says, her voice softening. “He gave me a head nod, but nothing from below the chin. How can such a strong smile only come out of your eyes?”

As soon as his old teacher walked past, Clay turned back to the sea. Enriquez, however, marveled over the quick exchange. “I walked up the rest of the steps thinking, That was so cool! All’s right with the world. That’s how Buddha would have looked at the waves. God, this kid is amazing!”