Aaron Pyle shifted from one foot to the other, head pointed down slightly as he looked from right to left, occasionally looking up and occasionally straight ahead, as he waited for his opportunity to talk with the night's speaker, Temple Grandin.

A half-circle of people had gathered round her at the back of Freeborn Hall, and Pyle's turn came and went when a latecomer to the group threw out her question ahead of his. Grandin had come to UC Davis at the invitation of the MIND Institute to talk about autism. She is a high-functioning autistic, and so is Pyle.

Finally, the 28-year-old looked right at Grandin — and they made eye contact, a trait that does not come naturally to autistics. "I taught him how to look people in the eye when he was 8 or 9," said Pyle's mother, Debi Lorraine, a database administrator with Information and Educational Technology at UC Davis.

She still tells him to smile more, Pyle said. "I've always thought of smiling in a utilitarian way," he said, "when something is humorous."

He is a man of few words, but he is articulate when he speaks, and, his mother said, articulate in his writing. But he cannot read people's emotions, cannot read their body language.

And people misjudge his body language, he said. They see him with his head down, looking away, arms folded, and they hear him talk in a way that may seem slow but actually reflects his mind's translation of pictures into words. And, quite frankly, he said, "They think I'm creepy."

He said his natural inclination is to avoid people. But he wants people to know that he is not creepy, and he wants so much more out of life.

So he was eager to attend one of Grandin's two talks at UC Davis, to listen to someone who has made her way successfully in her chosen career, animal science. Her autism, in fact, plays a role in her studies of animal behavior, as described in her book Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. She is a professor at Colorado State University.

'The power and the glory'

She has carved out a second career as a speaker and author on autism, having written Thinking in Pictures, and appearing as a guest on several national television and radio shows.

She spoke here as part of the MIND Institute's Distinguished Lecturer Series. Talks in this series normally take place at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. However, anticipating a large turnout for Grandin, the institute moved the talks to the main campus, and she ended up talking to about 1,400 people. Pyle, for one, was inspired.

Grandin talked of not having verbal skills until she was 3 or 4, of not liking to be touched when she was young, and how even today she does not like scratchy clothes, and how she has a terrible short-term memory and cannot multitask.

As a visual thinker, she said, she catalogs things and ideas as pictures in her mind. As a child, for example, she thought of the Lord's Prayer as a brilliant yellow-white rainbow exploding from an electric tower — imagery that to her evoked the prayer's phrase "the power and the glory." Her mind, in fact, works like Google's search engine for images, she said.

Ask her about church steeples, Grandin said, and she will conjure images of specific steeples she has seen. Her thinking goes from the specific to the general. Most other people's thinking goes from the general to the specific, so their first thought of a steeple will be two lines intersecting in a point, like when you touch the fingertips of each hand together and make an upside-down V.

She said she is more interested in things than people, and that suits her just fine in her work designing livestock handling facilities. Other autistics who lack in sociability are noted for their focus on music and art.

Pyle said he has read a couple of Grandin's books and had wanted to meet her for a couple of years. That opportunity came the night of Feb. 14.

He was interested in knowing how he might be more successful with the opposite sex. Later he and his mother explained how support for autistics is targeted at the very young, while people around Pyle's age are neglected.

Constant struggle

Susan Bacalman, a clinical social worker at the MIND Institute, acknowledged the challenge of meeting the needs of adults and older adolescents with autism. After they get out of school, she said, "the higher-functioning seem to get caught in this kind of nowhere land."

She said they struggle with finding jobs for which they are suited, and they struggle with their social lives, much like what Pyle is experiencing.

Grandin told Pyle much the same thing that she told her audiences earlier, when she addressed her comments more to parents of autistics than to autistics themselves. Find something they are interested in, and encourage them to excel at that. More important, determine what they can do that they can share with other people, and perhaps make a career out of it.

For her, it was cattle chutes. "I was obsessed with cattle chutes, but people aren't interested in talking about cattle chutes all day," she said. "But they are interested in people who can design them." And, today, that is what she does.

As for the opposite sex, Grandin told her audience, she never gave it a thought. "I was one of the ones who totally didn't do it," she said.

In talking with Pyle, she emphasized getting good at his skill and finding people who share his passion.

Pyle is passionate about art and drawing. He said he is taking a drafting class and is interested in becoming an architect. Like Grandin, he is a visual thinker. His mother said he can draw detailed layouts of places the family used to live.

His biggest goal now, though, is becoming more social. "A lot of times when I'm alone, I think of my autism as a curse, because, let's face it, it's a social world, we are social beings."

His mother recalled a story from Pyle's preschool days, when the teacher would ask the "class" to line up before going outside. Pyle would remain seated. He joined the line only after the teacher said his name, "Aaron, please line up."

"He didn't know he was part of the group," Lorraine said.

She said the MIND Institute and others like it are making wonderful progress on diagnosing and treating autism, but her son, at age 28, "is still in this gap" where little help is available.

"We don't want to change him, because there are things about him that are wonderful. But we want to help him fit in."

Bacalman runs a support group for adults and older adolescents with autism. The group meets the second Tuesday of the month, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the MIND Institute. For more information, contact Bacalman, 916-703-0305 or susan.bacalman@ucdmc.ucdavis.edu.