The following article, about OCLB's Shari Krishnan and her son, Nicholas, appeared on Sunday, July 11, 2004 in the Muskegon Chronicle. (It is not online, or we'd share the link.)
DRUM SONG
By Susan Harrison Wolffis
Chronicle staff writer
He was born "bright and beautiful," a child who started talking in complete sentences when he was only 8 months old.
Nicholas Krishnan never used baby talk; he liked description.
"He was scooting around in one of those little walkers, you know, like kids have," his mom says, "and he pointed at the angel on the Christmas tree ... 'angel in a bottle,' he said, because I kept it in a plastic tube the rest of the year.
"He was my little, expressive boy."
But when he was 18 months old, Nicholas was taken hostage, silenced by autism, a neurological disorder that stole his language, affected his agility and coordination, and robbed him of all his social skills.
"Sometimes, I felt like a childless mother," his mom says.
He stopped making eye contact with his mother, Shari Krishnan and his father, Dr. Rajan Krishnan, a medical oncologist, who live in Bloomfield Hills.
The twinkle in his eyes vanished. He no longer spoke.
"We thought we'd lost him," Shari Krishnan says. "It would be years before he would ever look at us again."
It is a natural place to stop in her son's story.
Nicholas, now 12, is at her side, munching on dry Cheerios while she talks in between the first of the day's three band rehearsals at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp.
Nicholas is a drummer.
Shari Krishnan touches his chin, lifting his face to look in his eyes.
"You OK, buddy?" she asks.
He does not answer with words, just a grin, and returns to the Cheerios.
He is dressed in his Blue Lake "blues" -- blue pants, blue shirt, blue sweater -- just like the other 150 fifth- and sixth-graders in music camp the past two weeks.
But he does not blend in.
Nicholas is the most severely disabled student ever to attend Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, says camp director Heidi Stansell.
"I expected them to say no when I called to ask about the possibility of my son coming to camp," Shari Krishnan says, "but I figured if you don't ask, you'll never know."
"My first response was: 'Why not?'" Stansell answers. "If you have family and parents to work with, why put up road blocks? I said, 'let's find a way to do this.'"
It meant Nick's mom coming to camp with him as his aide, sitting in on all the practices, going with him to all the events on the schedule morning, noon and night, hanging out in the lunchroom.
This morning at 9:30 a.m., with mom's help on his parts, Nick will be on stage in his band's final concert of the session.
The fine arts camp is familiar territory for Shari Krishnan. In 1976, she was a Blue Lake camper, an oboe and tenor sax player who grew up to be a nurse but who loved music even more than medicine.
Before her son was born, she prayed he would love music as much as she did.
"You have all these dreams for your child, and then something like this (autism) happens, and they tell you to get new dreams," she says. "Well, this ... camp ... is one of my first dreams to come true for him."
Every child comes to camp with a story, a challenge, a triumph, a parent's dream.
But Nicholas' is more significant than most.
As a boy, he learned to talk again, only after he started playing the drums.
As a camper, his lessons aren't all about music.
"He's learning to be a 12 year old," his mom says.
When doctors delivered the diagnosis that Nicholas was severely autistic, they painted a bleak future for the boy.
"They said the best we could hope for was placement in an institution," his mom says.
The Krishnans rejected the doctors' forecast. They took their boy with the big brown eyes, once so animated but now so vacant, home with them. They started on their own course of therapy: Suzuki violin lessons for discipline and the joy of music; gymnastics and swimming lessons to help his faltering coordination and sense of where his body fit into his surroundings.
"No one gives instruction books to parents on how to raise a kid with disabilities," Shari Krishnan says, "so you do the best you can."
Nothing seemed to click.
Until Nicholas played the drums.
When he was 4 years old, while Shari Krishnan was studying for her master's degree, she heard about a music therapy program in Colorado that used African drums to reach children with autism.
What happened, she says, is nothing short of a miracle.
The beat of the drum replaced the words no longer spoken between parents and child.
"We connected with our boy again," Shari Krishnan says.
"He couldn't do the give-and-take of conversation."
But he could answer the call-and-response of the drums, parents sounding out rhythms; Nicholas answering them.
"It was the only way we could talk to each other," his mother says.
"What do you like best about camp?" Nick's mom asks.
She points to the fingers on her hand: music, choir, band, kids, swimming.
Nicholas touches the fourth finger.
"Kids," he says.
When he was 6, Nicholas started to talk again.
His mom had given him a lollipop and, as always, she was talking to him, asking him what flavor it was, keeping up her end of the conversation, calling him "buddy;" calling him "my love."
"We were exhausted, wondering if we were doing the right things for him," she says, "and he always gave us signs that it was worth it."
She unwrapped the lollipop; he popped it into his mouth.
"It is root beer," he announced, waving it in the air as if it were a king's sceptre. Then he repeated himself. "It is root beer."
"We knew he had language in there," his mom says.
Nicholas is still no chatterbox. It's tough to engage him in spontaneous conversation. Left to his own devices, he sings quietly to himself, almost imperceptibly: songs from choir, music from band practice, conversation just past, camp songs the other kids sing while waiting in line, the scales and warm-up notes.
"Hi, Nick!" a crowd of girls calls to him in between practice sessions.
To the uninitiated, it seems like he isn't paying attention until his mother urges him to repeat himself.
"Big voice, buddy," she says.
"Hi, kids!" he shouts, his volume turned up high enough for everyone to hear.
"The kids are the big wow here," his mom says. "They are the magic."
"I never dreamed I'd have a disabled child," Shari Krishnan says.
She looks at her boy.
"But you know, after the crisis, after I got through the grief, I'd have had more," she says. "He's delightful to live with."
She touches his chin, gets him to look at her.
"I'm pretty fine with who you are," she tells him.
After lunch, Nick is fidgety. He doesn't want to practice, even with his mom's help. She sits with him at the drums, holding his hand, tapping the rhythm on his back.
He plugs his ears, then lays his head in her lap.
"Anyone can get along with good kids, well-behaved kids," his mother says, "but this is a hard kid sometimes."
"There are some moments when he's playing, and some he's not," says band director Shelley Rolland. "When you point to a note, he can play it."
But when he doesn't want to participate, there's no forcing him.
That may sound like a typical pre-teen, but Nicholas has special challenges. He wanders away if his mom isn't watching or holding on to his shirt. ("I don't want to hold his hand because he's 12," she says. "It's creepy to have your mom at camp with you.") He only eats things that are white.
When he's frustrated, he "flaps" his arms as so many children with autism do and laughs at jokes only he hears. He chews on a rubber snake, a substitute his parents got him so he'd stop chewing on his shirt collar.
When the rest of the kids sing silly camp songs to while away the time in lunch line, he plugs his ears and turns his back on them, separating himself from everyone.
But far from being the odd guy out, Nick has a talent that earns him respect from the rest of the kids.
He has perfect pitch.
After choir, they queue up to challenge him, and he always comes through.
"These kids say he's so smart," his mom says. "It's been fabulous."
She loves it that the kids at camp ask questions about Nicholas and his disability. She compliments their honesty and tears up when she reports she and her son are never excluded from what's going on.
"They never forget us," she says.
Nick's classmates at camp, and back at his public school in Bloomfield Hills, have grown up in the era of special education students being "mainstreamed" into classrooms.
"These kids are so nice to Nick and me," Nick's mom says. "He brings out the big hearts they already have."
Of all the coincidences possible, who would have believed Shari Krishnan's high school band teacher, Shelley Rolland, would be teaching at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp this summer?
Or that she works with autistic children in her band in Clarkston Community Schools?
"In music, you know where you came from," Rolland tells the band during a particularly sticky spot in rehearsal, "but more importantly, you know where you're going."
They are words Shari Krishnan hears with a mother's heart, not as a musician helping her son learn his part for this morning's concert.
She is 44; her husband is 61. They faced an uncertain future for their son the minute they heard the words "severe autism" when he was 18 months old.
They knew where they'd been and started planning where they were going.
"I want Nick to be an interested and interesting person," his mom says, watching him join two other percussionists in practice. "I want him to enjoy the world around him."
Nick suddenly leaves the two boys, isolating himself at a timpani. He strikes a deep, low note, then rests on the drum head to feel the rumble.
"And when I'm dead and gone," Shari Krishnan says, "I hope somebody will love my boy."
DRUM SONG
By Susan Harrison Wolffis
Chronicle staff writer
He was born "bright and beautiful," a child who started talking in complete sentences when he was only 8 months old.
Nicholas Krishnan never used baby talk; he liked description.
"He was scooting around in one of those little walkers, you know, like kids have," his mom says, "and he pointed at the angel on the Christmas tree ... 'angel in a bottle,' he said, because I kept it in a plastic tube the rest of the year.
"He was my little, expressive boy."
But when he was 18 months old, Nicholas was taken hostage, silenced by autism, a neurological disorder that stole his language, affected his agility and coordination, and robbed him of all his social skills.
"Sometimes, I felt like a childless mother," his mom says.
He stopped making eye contact with his mother, Shari Krishnan and his father, Dr. Rajan Krishnan, a medical oncologist, who live in Bloomfield Hills.
The twinkle in his eyes vanished. He no longer spoke.
"We thought we'd lost him," Shari Krishnan says. "It would be years before he would ever look at us again."
It is a natural place to stop in her son's story.
Nicholas, now 12, is at her side, munching on dry Cheerios while she talks in between the first of the day's three band rehearsals at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp.
Nicholas is a drummer.
Shari Krishnan touches his chin, lifting his face to look in his eyes.
"You OK, buddy?" she asks.
He does not answer with words, just a grin, and returns to the Cheerios.
He is dressed in his Blue Lake "blues" -- blue pants, blue shirt, blue sweater -- just like the other 150 fifth- and sixth-graders in music camp the past two weeks.
But he does not blend in.
Nicholas is the most severely disabled student ever to attend Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, says camp director Heidi Stansell.
"I expected them to say no when I called to ask about the possibility of my son coming to camp," Shari Krishnan says, "but I figured if you don't ask, you'll never know."
"My first response was: 'Why not?'" Stansell answers. "If you have family and parents to work with, why put up road blocks? I said, 'let's find a way to do this.'"
It meant Nick's mom coming to camp with him as his aide, sitting in on all the practices, going with him to all the events on the schedule morning, noon and night, hanging out in the lunchroom.
This morning at 9:30 a.m., with mom's help on his parts, Nick will be on stage in his band's final concert of the session.
The fine arts camp is familiar territory for Shari Krishnan. In 1976, she was a Blue Lake camper, an oboe and tenor sax player who grew up to be a nurse but who loved music even more than medicine.
Before her son was born, she prayed he would love music as much as she did.
"You have all these dreams for your child, and then something like this (autism) happens, and they tell you to get new dreams," she says. "Well, this ... camp ... is one of my first dreams to come true for him."
Every child comes to camp with a story, a challenge, a triumph, a parent's dream.
But Nicholas' is more significant than most.
As a boy, he learned to talk again, only after he started playing the drums.
As a camper, his lessons aren't all about music.
"He's learning to be a 12 year old," his mom says.
###
When doctors delivered the diagnosis that Nicholas was severely autistic, they painted a bleak future for the boy.
"They said the best we could hope for was placement in an institution," his mom says.
The Krishnans rejected the doctors' forecast. They took their boy with the big brown eyes, once so animated but now so vacant, home with them. They started on their own course of therapy: Suzuki violin lessons for discipline and the joy of music; gymnastics and swimming lessons to help his faltering coordination and sense of where his body fit into his surroundings.
"No one gives instruction books to parents on how to raise a kid with disabilities," Shari Krishnan says, "so you do the best you can."
Nothing seemed to click.
Until Nicholas played the drums.
When he was 4 years old, while Shari Krishnan was studying for her master's degree, she heard about a music therapy program in Colorado that used African drums to reach children with autism.
What happened, she says, is nothing short of a miracle.
The beat of the drum replaced the words no longer spoken between parents and child.
"We connected with our boy again," Shari Krishnan says.
"He couldn't do the give-and-take of conversation."
But he could answer the call-and-response of the drums, parents sounding out rhythms; Nicholas answering them.
"It was the only way we could talk to each other," his mother says.
###
"What do you like best about camp?" Nick's mom asks.
She points to the fingers on her hand: music, choir, band, kids, swimming.
Nicholas touches the fourth finger.
"Kids," he says.
###
When he was 6, Nicholas started to talk again.
His mom had given him a lollipop and, as always, she was talking to him, asking him what flavor it was, keeping up her end of the conversation, calling him "buddy;" calling him "my love."
"We were exhausted, wondering if we were doing the right things for him," she says, "and he always gave us signs that it was worth it."
She unwrapped the lollipop; he popped it into his mouth.
"It is root beer," he announced, waving it in the air as if it were a king's sceptre. Then he repeated himself. "It is root beer."
"We knew he had language in there," his mom says.
Nicholas is still no chatterbox. It's tough to engage him in spontaneous conversation. Left to his own devices, he sings quietly to himself, almost imperceptibly: songs from choir, music from band practice, conversation just past, camp songs the other kids sing while waiting in line, the scales and warm-up notes.
"Hi, Nick!" a crowd of girls calls to him in between practice sessions.
To the uninitiated, it seems like he isn't paying attention until his mother urges him to repeat himself.
"Big voice, buddy," she says.
"Hi, kids!" he shouts, his volume turned up high enough for everyone to hear.
"The kids are the big wow here," his mom says. "They are the magic."
###
"I never dreamed I'd have a disabled child," Shari Krishnan says.
She looks at her boy.
"But you know, after the crisis, after I got through the grief, I'd have had more," she says. "He's delightful to live with."
She touches his chin, gets him to look at her.
"I'm pretty fine with who you are," she tells him.
###
After lunch, Nick is fidgety. He doesn't want to practice, even with his mom's help. She sits with him at the drums, holding his hand, tapping the rhythm on his back.
He plugs his ears, then lays his head in her lap.
"Anyone can get along with good kids, well-behaved kids," his mother says, "but this is a hard kid sometimes."
"There are some moments when he's playing, and some he's not," says band director Shelley Rolland. "When you point to a note, he can play it."
But when he doesn't want to participate, there's no forcing him.
That may sound like a typical pre-teen, but Nicholas has special challenges. He wanders away if his mom isn't watching or holding on to his shirt. ("I don't want to hold his hand because he's 12," she says. "It's creepy to have your mom at camp with you.") He only eats things that are white.
When he's frustrated, he "flaps" his arms as so many children with autism do and laughs at jokes only he hears. He chews on a rubber snake, a substitute his parents got him so he'd stop chewing on his shirt collar.
When the rest of the kids sing silly camp songs to while away the time in lunch line, he plugs his ears and turns his back on them, separating himself from everyone.
But far from being the odd guy out, Nick has a talent that earns him respect from the rest of the kids.
He has perfect pitch.
After choir, they queue up to challenge him, and he always comes through.
"These kids say he's so smart," his mom says. "It's been fabulous."
She loves it that the kids at camp ask questions about Nicholas and his disability. She compliments their honesty and tears up when she reports she and her son are never excluded from what's going on.
"They never forget us," she says.
Nick's classmates at camp, and back at his public school in Bloomfield Hills, have grown up in the era of special education students being "mainstreamed" into classrooms.
"These kids are so nice to Nick and me," Nick's mom says. "He brings out the big hearts they already have."
###
Of all the coincidences possible, who would have believed Shari Krishnan's high school band teacher, Shelley Rolland, would be teaching at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp this summer?
Or that she works with autistic children in her band in Clarkston Community Schools?
"In music, you know where you came from," Rolland tells the band during a particularly sticky spot in rehearsal, "but more importantly, you know where you're going."
They are words Shari Krishnan hears with a mother's heart, not as a musician helping her son learn his part for this morning's concert.
She is 44; her husband is 61. They faced an uncertain future for their son the minute they heard the words "severe autism" when he was 18 months old.
They knew where they'd been and started planning where they were going.
"I want Nick to be an interested and interesting person," his mom says, watching him join two other percussionists in practice. "I want him to enjoy the world around him."
Nick suddenly leaves the two boys, isolating himself at a timpani. He strikes a deep, low note, then rests on the drum head to feel the rumble.
"And when I'm dead and gone," Shari Krishnan says, "I hope somebody will love my boy."
### END ###
