My son, Dan, is among the most intelligent of all my children. He "gets" the deep underpiinnings even in a movie other young men his age prize mostly for the action and special effects. And he doesn't say much, but when he does, it's something you remember.

He rarely used to speak. His words became tangled in a skein of oily yarn on the way from his mind to his hand or his lips, and his efforts to pick apart the threads made him even more frustrated, as the knots caught firmer and the whole thing got more soiled, until it hardly resembled the original insight. "Forget it," he would often say. The bright line that had shot forth no longer was recognizable, no longer worth the effort.

Even in college, at first Dan could not admit that he could not take notes and attend to what was going on in class at the same time. While he did register for learning disability services, he never told his instructors that he needed special accommodations.

His ORIGINAL high school LD supervisor had done her job well -- that is, badly. She had instilled in Dan a belief that would take years of counseling to unravel, a dirty tangle of messages: Lazy. Stupid. Unable to cut it in college.

Though in his final year, he had a wonderful LD teacher, the damage had already been done.

What we didn't know, and Dan didn't know, until he was in high school, was that he didn't have the kind of learning disabilties that can be treated only with a pill. A voracious reader, he could barely fill out an application for a library card. And though he had insights and opinions about many issues, trying to organize them in a way that was coherent was beyond him, without help.

At first, Dan though that handing his LD materials to instructors was "like giving someone a certificate saying you're stupid." And he tried hard to do without. But he couldn't. He fell behind and eventually had to repeat the courses.

Still, a few years before this happened, a woman named Penny Bright had come into our lives.

A speech and language pathologist, and a human being whose name truly suits her. Penny quickly saw that Dan had a non-specific speech and language processing disorder. She suggested a computer program that Dan would take in summer school, one usually administer to third-graders. And he did it, along with the third-graders, whom he taught to shoot hoops during breaks, and by the next year, Dan was expressing himself ever more fluently.

It would still take time to uproot the shame, but now Dan says that he will never give up -- not until he achieves his goal of becoming a chef. Each week, as he has for years, he works with Penny Bright, whose compassion and understanding, when Dan leaps backward after taking ten hesitant small steps forward exceeds all understanding.

Or perhaps it does not.

Perhaps, unlike so many other people supposedly trained to understand that some kids really, truly DO HAVE "learning differences," instead of simply being unmotivated and frustrating in their seeming inability to get organized and their persistent tendency to fiddle around, she can do one thing that no one else did.

She gave our son respect.

She gave him the same respect we gave him.

She gave him help, but more than that, she gave him the same respect she would have given an intelligent kid who needed to walk with a cane but longed to participate in sports -- and finally did, just in a different way from ordinary kids.

May is the month in which speech pathologists such as Penny are celebrated.

In her quest to draw awareness to the topic, so that other families such as ours, drowning in the grief of not really being able to figure out what was wrong, she sent a news release to local newspapers. But no one was much interested. No one usually is. And that is why, until the current era, most kids such as our bright, amiable son ended up living their lives with their song trapped inside them.

But we care. And we celebrate. In our home, Penny Bright is not just a teacher and speech pathologist, she's a hero.

She unlocked Dan's song, and she continues to prod him to work at the doors he needs to unlock in unusual ways -- so that one day, he will do this on his own. It's a long process, and it's a process that would fry anyone. Still, she does it with amazing grace.

If you see this, and have a kid with learning disabilities for whom the usual regimen doesn't seem to work, you may have a child like Dan. And you can find a speech pathologist like Penny, through the national association. And when you do, things will start to fall into place that never made sense before.

And gradually, the pride you always felt for your child, as you desperately tried to instill hope while others tried to rob it from him, may gradually become something he can feel for himself. And there is no greater gift than the chance to feel pride.

So, Penny, this one's for you and other unsung heroes like you. You have helped give kids back to themselves, and healed so many hearts. Ours are among them.