Ability

As a second grader, Emariye Louden is extraordinary. He founded a botany club, and he’s taught his classmates how to pick ripe lemons. He has also been placed in a gifted class at 99^th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles.

Medical and social service groups have generally retired the phrase mental retardation. Today, they use terms like mental disability, cognitive disability or developmental delay. But retarded still has life in the English language as an insult. And therein hangs a tale.

When I first met Graciela Tiscareno-Sato, I was literally living in the wild. In 1991, Grace and I were both students in the U.S. Air Force Survival School, and we spent a week in the forest on the Canadian border, eating ants and worms and trying to make fire with sticks. I was terrible at this stuff, but Lt. Tiscareno – as she was known then – became a “go-to” person for everyone in the unit. She wasn’t much better at starting fires than the rest of us, but her can-do spirit made her feel like someone you could lean on.