Following Ezra (10 page)

“Come
on
,” I plead. “It’s a toy.”

Never have parents begged with such persistence for a green hunk of plastic to be allowed onto an airplane, but the woman won’t relent.

“Crocodile!” Ezra screams, reaching for the toy. Shawn tries to comfort him while I rush back to the airline counter, trying to skip the lengthy line of stone-faced business commuters and explain to a clerk why I am in such a hurry to check a pint-size
Sesame Street
backpack and return to my family.

Ezra’s strong attraction to animals becomes something deeper when the wildlife is real. One autumn Sunday, when he is still three, Shawn and I pile the boys into the Toyota minivan and drive to Griffith Park, where the Los Angeles Zoo stretches over eighty acres of gently sloping hills. Our afternoon with our three young children among the flamingos and meerkats feels to me like a lovely but ordinary family outing, but it is igniting something new within Ezra.

This shows up soon after, when he is taking his evening bath and I notice him reciting a long list of animals to himself: “Tiger . . . bear . . . rhinoceros . . . hippo. . . .” Following along, I suddenly realize what he is doing: ticking off the names of the animals in the exact order we saw them at the zoo.

The next time we return to Griffith Park, he announces most of the animals even before we have arrived at an exhibit. At the seals: “
Now
let’s go see the polar bears.” At the polar bears: “
Now
it’s time for the otters.” Just as with his animal patterns in the backyard, the combination of rigid order and wild animals stimulates him.

So we keep going back.

At times, I wonder if it is the animals he is attracted to, or just the order. After school one afternoon, I visit the zoo with Ezra, who is so eager that he pulls my arm to get as quickly as possible from the car to the gate. Then he dashes on his regular circuit through the zoo, barely pausing. I feel baffled by the behavior and upset at how disconnected he seems. On the drive home, I ask Ezra why he didn’t stop to look at the animals.

“I thought we came here to look at the giraffes and the lions and gorillas,” I say. “What were you doing?”

As we make our way through downtown traffic, he is silent again for a few moments and then says something just audible: “I saw them.”

Yes. But I can’t fathom what could explain his rush.

Not long after that we are at a local children’s museum that has an interactive Noah’s Ark exhibit, including large buckets of the plastic animals Ezra so enjoys. While the other boys circulate through the various displays and activities, Ezra spends the entire hour picking through the animals, dividing them by species and size in the toy ark’s small compartments. It strikes me that this is exactly what has been drawing Ezra to the zoo. He has cataloged all the species in his mind. He draws comfort from finding them where they are supposed to be: the koalas in their tree, the lemurs in their cage, the elephants wandering their grounds. Nearly everywhere else he goes, my son is filled with anxiety. Human beings can be unpredictable and scary, with their social rules and their subtle facial expressions. But the giraffes don’t ask questions, and the chimps don’t care what you say about them. Ezra doesn’t merely want to see animals; he wants to live in this mannered world, with its patterns and structures and where there are no surprises.

On another afternoon I encourage him to walk slowly, and I hang back to see what he will do. We arrive at the sea lions just as a zookeeper brings a pail of fish for lunch. Ezra leans on the metal rail and gazes for half an hour, entranced, watching the keeper toss fish. He’s fascinated with how the creatures swim for their food, crawling in and out of the pool. I think of how Ezra can barely sit at the cafeteria table, how he endures karate lessons only while asking his instructor every two minutes when the hour will be up. As I watch him smile with delight, I feel a profound sense of hope mixed with sadness—hope that he has found something that brings him such pleasure, sadness that he hasn’t shown that kind of focused engagement with other people.

Instead of letting his passion for animals become yet another lonely avenue, I decide to make it the foundation of a connection between the two of us. I find myself making the trek to Griffith Park as frequently as I can. Elsewhere, Ezra can be a tangle of tics and repetitive motions, uttering snippets of video dialogue, and hiding out under blankets or mattresses. At the zoo, all of that melts away. I let him flash our membership card, we pass through the familiar gates, and I watch him sprint to the sea lions, morphing within minutes into a different boy: calm, open, and happy.

“Oh,
there’s
the little ocelot. You see it?” he says, a lilt in his voice, eyes wide with innocent delight.

Friends tease me, curious about how a grown man could spend so much time watching koalas chew on leaves. But I never tire of watching my son, never get bored with the way the zoo transforms him. I cherish those sixty or ninety minutes in which I can connect with Ezra and we can fit in with the crowds, just like any other father and son.

And I feel continually surprised by the revelations that come from Ezra’s fascination with animals. Long after Ami and even Noam have outgrown their interest in zoo visits—as most children do—Ezra’s attraction just soars.

For Ezra’s tenth birthday, Shawn’s brother and his wife send him a book that might have come straight out of Ezra’s dreams.
Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide to the World’s Wildlife
is a seven-and-a-half-pound, 624-page visual encyclopedia of nearly every animal on the planet. Ezra adopts the hefty volume, with its cover close-up of a mandrill’s colorful face, as his constant companion. On Saturday mornings, he silently pores over it in synagogue as if it were the Torah itself. On the school bus, while other kids chat or stare off, Ezra inhales data about habitats and extinction rates. I come to think of it as my son’s way of bringing the zoo along with him.

Not long after that, during another visit to Portland, my father takes a morning off from work to bring Ezra and me to the Oregon Zoo. As the three of us make our way, Dad grows amused and enchanted by his grandson’s enthusiasm and knowledge. We are in a complex of squat buildings housing the primates when Dad looks into one cage.

“What kind of monkey is that?” he asks.

“That’s not a monkey; it’s a siamang, the largest gibbon—lower risk of extinction,” Ezra tells him, moving on quickly to the next exhibit.

Dad surreptitiously pulls out his cell phone and accesses the Internet. “He’s right!” he says with a delighted grin. I feel gratified that my father has shared the kind of moment I have experienced so often with Ezra, an instant of grasping and celebrating what makes his grandson unique.

 

 

Ezra doesn’t simply remember the
animals. He has a remarkable recall of his interactions with them.

At nine years old, he is reading aloud to me from a book that mentions a character’s favorite bird. I take the opportunity to ask him his.

“A woodpecker,” he says.

I ask him if he has ever seen a woodpecker.

“No,” he says. “But I’ve heard one, when we were on a hike on November twenty-eighth, 2003. It was a Friday.”

He is, of course, correct. A year and a half earlier, friends joined us for an outing in Malibu the day after Thanksgiving. Ezra asked that morning about the ticking sound he kept hearing echoing through the woods. I wasn’t aware that he had tucked away the memory.

In fact, he has accumulated an extensive mental diary of such moments, whose entries he shares spontaneously at random moments, over pizza or in the car. His are not mere fleeting memories. They seem to transport him back to the place and time, as if Ezra is reliving the sights and sounds and even the feelings he had inside. “Remember at the Santa Barbara Zoo in November of 2005,” he says over his oatmeal, breaking into laughter, “when that baby threw her daddy’s hat in to the otters?”

He giggles loudly and recounts again and again the time at a zoo when he happened upon the sun bear exhibit just in time to spot one of the bears urinating. Like any preadolescent, he finds the thought of a peeing animal endlessly funny. He smiles when he remembers the time Shawn’s parents, then living in Ohio, brought him and his brothers to visit a farm, where an unruly goose made its presence known with loud and persistent honking.

But the memories aren’t all good. Once, on a visit to a small zoo in rural Big Bear, California, we arrive at an enclosure of owls just after they have been offered a luncheon of dead white mice. For months and years after, I can see him struggle on occasion to block the memory from his brain. Even hearing mention of the name of the zoo makes him physically agitated—so much so that he covers his ears, closes his eyes, and says, “Stop-stop-stop-stop-
stop
!”

Possessing a superhuman memory has its drawbacks; when he wants to shake an unpleasant recollection, it can prove difficult.

Yet, with the exception of those rare, painful images, I can sense that Ezra is accumulating a storehouse full of joyous memories that he carries with him, just as he lugs the hefty animal book around. The familiar paths of the Los Angeles Zoo (and the other zoos he visits) provide a happy place—not school, where he struggles to focus and make sense of the rules; not home, where he can work himself into a frenzy with his repetitious habits. At the zoo, his soul seems serene.

I am building my own memories as well, forging a deep connection with my son through the simple sharing of experiences. The more we visit the zoo, the closer I feel to him, and the more I marvel at his struggles, his worries, his quirks, and his wondrous mind. Without setting out to do so, I have discovered a place and a way to connect with Ezra.

Not everyone shares my delight. In his excitement to see the blacknecked swans one day when he is ten, Ezra jostles his way past an older man and inadvertently plants himself directly in front of the man’s son, blocking the child’s view.

“
Excuse
me!” the man says.

Ezra, oblivious to such social nuance, just keeps gazing.

“Do you
mind
?” the man continues.

He doesn’t. “Abba, you see the swan?” Ezra says—still not noticing the man, and now outing me as his escort. The man glares at me.

“He could say, ‘Excuse me’!” the man says.

I have an answer prepared for such situations, but I never actually trot it out. I imagine myself stepping over, putting my face right in his, narrowing my eyes, and unloading. “Mister,” I say, “it’s a miracle that kid can speak at all.” That would be followed by a lecture on the neurological underpinnings of autism and a sob story about my son’s journey through special education and a series of doctors and therapists, and conclude with a final admonition: “I think
you’re
the one who should say, ‘Excuse me’!”

That’s what I dream of saying. Instead, I follow Ezra’s lead: I ignore the man and watch the animal. (Occasionally, I wonder whether it might be better in such situations to educate strangers by patiently explaining what makes my son different. But I usually err on the side of letting people experience a different type of person, unfiltered.)

“Yes, I see it!” I say, looking at the swan. “It’s
beautiful
, isn’t it?”

By then, Ezra has slipped through the crowd and I trail him as he scurries off toward the Chinese alligator, blissfully unaware of the disgruntled gentleman he is leaving behind.

Even when he isn’t bumping into people, Ezra can stand out. There simply aren’t many children his size at the zoo cooing so excitedly and loudly over the animals. He has never really learned sensitivity about controlling the volume of his voice, even in places like movie theaters and restaurants, so he certainly isn’t going to learn that among the Sunday throngs crowding the paved paths of the L.A. Zoo. Ezra has developed a particular affection for otters and lemurs, both species that seem to share his playful and gentle nature. Seeing the otters so excites him that on some visits he stands at their enclosure literally bouncing on his toes with glee and excitedly reciting one factoid after another for every passerby to hear: “Those are otters! Otters are mammals! They’re in the same family as weasels, badgers, and skunks! My favorite kind is the North American river otter and also the sea otter!” He seems more delighted with each new detail, and other visitors must wonder whether perhaps this little boy works here in some capacity. “They’re carnivores! They like to eat fish! They’re very playful!” I have heard this litany over and over, though sometimes he surprises me by adding a new piece of information: “Otters live on every continent except Australia and Antarctica!”

One afternoon when he is eleven he’s watching the sifaka lemurs, pacing and hopping in his orange fleece jacket as he mimics the movements of the animals bouncing inside the cage. “I love these guys!” he squeals. “They’re
soooooo cuuuute
.” Other visitors come and go: moms pushing strollers, a den of Cub Scouts. Occasionally I catch a couple of them exchanging looks, as if to say, “What’s
wrong
with that kid?”

Once self-conscious and worried, I have learned from Ezra to ignore those glances. Like Ezra, I leave my troubles and concerns at the zoo gate, letting go of worries about money or work and losing myself in the animals and our shared moments.

As much as I cherish that link, I do sometimes wonder whether Ezra might ever find another child with whom to share the experience, a friend to make his existence that much less solitary. One Sunday when Ezra is ten, Shawn has joined us at the zoo when a woman about my age approaches us.

“I think my son knows your son from school,” she says.

Ezra does recognize the boy, an awkward ten-year-old who, it turns out, shares his passion for animals and the zoo. The boy is carrying a digital camera, and shows us how he likes to catalog the animals, stopping at each exhibit to photograph the informational sign, then the animals inside. His mother explains to us how he prints the photos and assembles them into albums he likes to flip through at home.