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From the time I was in high school, I planned to go into the medical field, maybe even become a doctor.

At the end of my second year of college, however, I was struggling with a difficult chemistry course, and I started asking myself, Ayala, why are you doing this?

My grandmother had always told me that I was a natural teacher, so I decided to forget about medicine and go into teaching. Having worked at Camp HASC during the summers and volunteered many hours for Yachad, the special-needs population was very dear to my heart, and I thought that special ed would be much more interesting than regular education. And so it was that I earned a master’s degree in special ed and began working as a teacher of children with disabilities.

I was very close with my grandmother, and I always enjoyed sitting at her kitchen table and catching up with her over a glass of juice and a plate of freshly cut melon. She would tell me how she and my grandfather, who died when I was three, had grown up in traditional families, and had begun their marriage in line with their upbringing: traditional, but not very observant. After their first son was born, they decided that they wanted to send him to yeshivah, but they didn’t want their home to be in conflict with what he would be learning in yeshivah, so in the 1950s — well before the baal teshuvah movement — my grandparents took the highly unpopular step of becoming frum.

Around that time, their second son, Norman, was born. Norman suffered from mental retardation, due to either oxygen deprivation at birth or genetic factors. (At the time, the field of medicine was not advanced enough to conclusively determine the cause of his condition.) Back then, kids who were born with disabilities were immediately institutionalized; doctors didn’t know what to do with them, and parents had no resources to draw upon. There was little available for Norman by way of educational programming or therapy.

But my grandparents refused to institutionalize Norman. He was their child, even if there was no one who could help them care for him. Norman started off in yeshivah, but that arrangement did not work, so my grandparents sent him to a public school that had a special class.

Although Norman never learned to read, write, or tell time, he was able to carry on basic conversation, and he maintained the same overall daily structure as other kids his age, which allowed him to feel relatively normal.

When Norman graduated from school, my grandfather wanted him to get a steady job. He had heard that the post office was hiring, and he thought Norman would make a great custodian. (Norman was always very neat, and good at following instructions.) The only problem was that at the time, the post office required all employees to pass a written exam — and, unlike today, there were no allowances made for persons with disabilities. Confident that Norman could do the job, my grandfather went to the testing site with him, and they both sat down to take the test. Norman’s paper remained blank, but my grandfather wrote Norman’s name on his own test and handed it in. That was the launch of Norman’s career at the post office.

The next challenge was how to get Norman to work each day. My grandparents lived in Brooklyn, while the post office where Norman worked was located in lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center. For months, my grandfather accompanied Norman to work every day on the subway and then returned in the evening to pick him up. Eventually, when my grandfather felt that Norman was familiar enough with the route, he allowed him to go himself. Even so, for the next few weeks, he followed Norman surreptitiously on the subway to make sure that he found his way there and back.