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The autistic worlds of brothers Craig and Kevin Adcock are as different as they are similar, spinning along as usual on a Tuesday afternoon at their home in Greenville.
With the earplugs of his Walkman feeding favorite music - perhaps Nickelback or Queen - into his head, Kevin, 19, glides through his mother's neatly kept kitchen on a predetermined path into and out of every room on the first floor.
He will land briefly in the den and take a quick click through TV land with the remote, but after a while he will circle again. This is one of Kevin's many rituals, and he will repeat it dozens of times until the clock in the dining room chimes 7 p.m., and he goes upstairs to bed.
Craig, 22, is deeply immersed in a ritual of his own - he is unloading the dishwasher.
He lifts a plate from the rack and half drops it onto the counter. As the plate lands with a slight spin, Craig raises his arms above his head, his fingers wiggling in the air.
Then, he picks up the plate and touches it to the wooden frame of the kitchen window beside him. First, to the right of the glass.
Tap.
Then, to the left of the glass.
Tap.
Craig turns to the counter behind him and spins the plate once more, his arms rising again in that same hallelujah motion.
Every dish and pot from dinner will get the same treatment.
Spin.
Hallelujah.
Tap.
Tap.
Spin.
Hallelujah ...
'When did you stop learning?'
It is impossible to know what Craig is thinking as he unloads the dishwasher. He spoke his last complete sentence 19 years ago, when he was just 3, while shopping with his parents at a drugstore. His parents will never forget his words: "Can I have some gum?"
Dan and Ellen Adcock now know that autism was stealing their blond, blue-eyed boy away. But back then they went from doctor to doctor - from St. Louis to Chicago to Los Angeles - to find a correct diagnosis.
Autism, which strikes in early childhood, was still rarely diagnosed in the 1980s when the Adcocks' two sons were toddlers.
Ellen Adcock, 44, knows the medical definition: Autism...