Life, Animated (15 page)

But the goal for all these elaborate plans is stark in its simplicity: for Owen to have his “turn,” as much like Walt—and every other Jewish kid—as is humanly possible.

And this subtle pressure and hope, to make it happen for this kid, ripples through everyone involved in the emotive choreography of a Torah service. One after another, people get summoned to the stage, called the
bima
—with the Hebrew word
“ya’ah’mode,”
for “rise up”—to usher Owen forward through the service. The procession starts with Cornelia’s parents, who, together, read a Sanskrit prayer in English. Cornelia’s father, John, a man with a famously narrow emotive range, caps it with a surprise flourish. “Owen, may you always walk in sunshine. May you never want for more. May Irish angels rest their wings right beside your door,” he recites,
his voice cracking with emotion on the last word.

Cornelia squeezes my hand. “Oh, boy,” she whispers, “here we go.”

Sitting beside her in the front row, I feel the pull of a current, a deep mysterious thing that runs on its own twisting path from the
James and the Giant Peach
play, where the kids lifted Owen on their shoulders, to a warm sensation of this whole room now here to lift him. As people are called forth for the many ritual roles—opening the ark where the Torah is held, removing it, carrying it around the room, removing the heavy velvet and silver ornamentation so it can be unscrolled, and then reading short passages, preceded and followed by short prayers—you can see them whispering to Owen, there in their midst—“This way, Owie” or “Walk beside me, buddy”—as they nudge him along, lifting him.

Or maybe he’s lifting us. Lines are blurred. As Cornelia and I are called to the
bima
to present him with his prayer shawl, or
tallit
, we’re all smiles and a little unsteady. This moment, when the parents say something to the child, is a moment of oddly public intimacies, where you encourage and praise your child, express love, and reach for some religious verity…with a roomful of eavesdroppers. It’s spiritually voyeuristic—with the sorts of things you may never have said to your kids turned into oratory.

Cornelia tells the story of Walt’s friend who once called Owen a “magic boy,” and she now tells him it’s true, “because you get so much joy out of life and see the wonderful things so many of us miss.” She’s speaking about his goodness, for sure, but also hinting about how that makes him vulnerable. “My prayer for you Owen,” she says, “is that you always see life with your heart and that you trust in all the people here today who hold you in their hearts with such love, and you continue to teach others with all the gifts God has given you.” To the trained ear, it’s a plea that this boy, with gentle gifts, will need help and protection and caring, up ahead, in a long life, which is, hereby, the obligation of everyone in this room—a verbal contract affirmed, Cornelia fervently hopes, with silent nods, row to row.

Throughout her speech, Owen is looking all over—the skylights, the thick rug under his best shoes—and barely at Cornelia or me. It’s gaze aversion. It’s his way. I pull him gently toward us, holding both his hands, slipping a “Hey, buddy” in between her lines to compel his attention.

And it’s no different for my turn, as I tell a crafted story about Owen to Owen, with witnesses, that I hope will subtly alter everyone’s view of him and his of himself. I’m trying to bind it—just as Cornelia has done—into a contract with everyone in the room to hedge against my own fears. I cite a nascent shift we’d seen in the preceding months where he decided to start calling us Mom and Dad, not Mommy and Daddy, and mentioned, once in passing, that he was giving some of his Disney movies “a rest” in favor of a growing passion for the live-action Batman films, where Tim Burton, he said, “turned Gotham into a dark, gloomy character.” We figured, with the bar mitzvah coming he was taking cues from Walt and, in some subconscious calculus, I wanted to lock that in, to encourage his reach for the socially acceptable and age-appropriate. This was both for Owen and for everyone in the room who might help along this adolescent maturation. So, after framing this little story as part of “becoming a man,” I recite Owen’s own words from a month before back to him: “Owen, you told me ‘It’s time for me to leave the Disney villains behind and move past little kid things. That it’s time for Batman, for a little darkness and complexity.’” Of course, this draws laughs.

And even bigger ones, when Owen responds—“And SpongeBob!”—basically killing the whole gambit.

“But, Owen,
some
darkness and complexity?”

“And SpongeBob!” he exclaims again (more laughs), and—leaving it there—I push to close it with a grasp at something spiritual, talking about his special quality of talking to God, of feeling his presence. “And as you grow and explore and reach for the stars, keep talking to God. And, while you’re at it, tell him thanks from us, for bringing you into our lives.”

Then we’re done speaking on his behalf. Cornelia says love him the way he is, or else; I say help him change, so he can make his own way in an unforgiving world—a pair of political/emotional statements of parent to child, read from typed pages shaking lightly in our hands.

We step down, as he puts the prayer shawl over his shoulders and steps to the podium; the Torah, unscrolled, awaits. This we watch from our seats—nothing we can do now; just him up there, with the imperious Mim, his tutor, on one side, and Rachel Hersh—the temple’s Judy Collins-like cantor leading the service on the other.

But he seems calm and starts looking with intent curiosity at the sea of eyes. He’s never had so many people look at him. He appears free of fear and the performance anxiety that usually accompanies knowing what people think and caring so deeply about it. And he’s got an asset here: the memory that allowed him to store and encode a few dozen hours of Disney films, though—at the start—he couldn’t understand the English any better than he now doesn’t understand Hebrew. He doesn’t memorize anything he doesn’t care about. But Mim whispers the first word of his Torah portion, and it’s clear he cares, chanting line after line of Hebrew, looking out at the crowd, Mim by his side, silently reading each word in the old scroll—something she often does in services, as the no-nonsense guardian of the sacred book—her lips moving gently. After a few minutes, he’s finished with this long and startling recitation. She nods.
Perfect
. And after he recites the closing prayer, perfect again, she smiles and holds out her hand. He palms it, a gentle high five, and she gets out the word
“ya’ah’mode”
trying to call forward those to now redress the Torah—before her voice falters and sudden tears blind her. Seeing this woman cry kills me, and Cornelia, too, in some echo, I suppose, of a thousand years of girls who were told they didn’t belong up here, either. And Mim—genuinely surprised, like someone caught in a spring shower—wipes her eyes and slips off the bima.

And all this was before he got to the English.

We knew what was coming—we’d heard the speech. It was like a four-paragraph-long grace before dinner, exercising this invisible prayer muscle of his. It makes no sense, really. Ask him to write about what he’s read in a third-grade textbook or heard a teacher say, repeatedly, and you get two thin sentences, with simple verbs and misspellings. Ask him to dig deep inside for something to say to God, in front of all the people he knows, and it flows like music.

And we know everyone in the room is about to witness this contradiction—just as we know the way many of them look at the “left behind” as Owen would say. The way we used to.

He says that his Torah portion contains many commandments about ethics, “about right and wrong,” including “one of the most important rules in this chapter: that you should not put a stumbling block in front of a blind person. This means you should never trick someone or be unkind to them. A blind person has a handicap and God tells us that we should never take advantage of another person’s weakness.”

As he talks, he rhythmically punches the end of each sentence—something we told him makes for good public speaking—and he says that his passage tells us to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and that
neighbor
doesn’t just mean the person living next door but “all the people we know and meet in our life.”

He pauses. Adjusts the pages. Then, up comes his index finger. It’s not clear if it’s accusatory or just keeping time, like a metronome. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to love their neighbors as themselves,” he says, pointing matter-of-factly to the crowd. “People can be angry or jealous or mean or hateful or rude or scared and that can keep them from treating their neighbor with love and understanding.” He flips a page. “Sometimes people are scared of people who are not like them. They can be mean and ignore them sometimes.” His voice goes soft as he says this last sentence, like he’s talking to himself, in an empty room, and then he looks up, almost surprised to see the full house. “That would make you scared or sad if someone treated you that way, wouldn’t it?”

Now he’s talking right to them, everyone at once, his index finger pointing out each word.

“I feel like I’m a special person because God made me special.” He nods. His lips purse. “God gave me strength and courage and a big heart.”

He looks out for a long minute. We see his eyes moving across the faces, studying some as they grimace with suppressed emotion, others as they speak with their nods. He’s clearly trying to connect, to all of them at once. Then he turns back to the speech for a line that we know he feels most strongly.

“God wants us to treat everyone in our life like they’re special, too.”

If you ask people years later what they remember from the speech, their memories tend to stop with that line.

The few who recall that Owen went on to talk about his dinnertime prayers and how he “prayed that God would take care of Granny and Lizzy and make them all better”—tend to be in the Kennedy family, who had been struggling with their matriarch’s lung cancer for the past year, and the cancer that Cornelia’s sister, Lizzy, was battling at the time of the bar mitzvah.

A handful who remember he ended his speech with “My prayers always start with the word
hope
—I like the word
hope
,” tend to be from my side, who know that the word
hatikva
means
hope
in Hebrew. That’s the song—the Israeli national anthem—he then played on the piano to finish the service, looking up from the sheet music and across the eyes of the guests, like he did when he recited Hebrew.

Memory is like that. A hook—some powerful association or moment of changed perspective—that helps keep it locked in tight, fresh for retrieval, years hence.

Which is why no one in attendance that day will forget the way one very unique young man told them how all of us should be treated, in the eyes of God, as though we are special.

At a reception after the service, Paul O’Neill and Cedric Jennings ask pointed questions about Owen and what autistic kids are capable of. I tell them a bit about the sidekicks and heroes. O’Neill laughs—“I suppose I was a sidekick to President Bush, but I’m not sure if he was hero or villain.” The church-bred Cedric wonders if Owen would ever consider becoming a preacher.

My mother, Shirl, a former concert pianist and schoolteacher—whose second husband also died of cancer, just a few years after my father—has long felt that a dark cloud was following her. She couldn’t help but see Owen’s struggle as part of that, of that cloud settling over us now, and struggled to see him as anything other than damaged and diminished. After the service, she seems strangely unmoored, joyous. Something about Owen defining “special,” then playing a song called “Hope,” while looking directly at her, helped her see him anew. “He was really something up there,” she whispers, taking me aside as the crowd moves toward the temple’s reception hall. She looks intently into my eyes, as though searching for cues. “Really, Ronald, I wouldn’t have believed it.” She doesn’t talk to me this way—ever.

A bit later, my oldest friend from childhood, also takes me aside. “Is Shirl okay? She’s not her usual self, you know, missing stuff.” He was right, the first to notice the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Later, visiting her in an assisted-living apartment, I would think often of that moment, and how her hard judgments—born, like any, from formative experiences and selected memory—may have been loosened by the illness, freeing her, in a way, to see with new eyes.

That, after all, was what had been happening naturally and forcefully, day by day, year to year, inside our home: the judgments Cornelia and I once housed—widely accepted suppositions about those with so-called “intellectual disabilities”—were being dislodged, often against our will, and replaced with a much deeper understanding.

Now it’s happening as a group affair. The lightness we’ve sometimes felt, the lifting of burdens—like on the night with Iago, or the discovery of Owen’s sketchbook—now seems to warm the temple’s banquet hall, detectable in the glistening eyes of friends, the rosiness in their cheeks, the way they hug Owen.

And, to our surprise, in the way he hugs them back.

Walt wakes up on Saturday morning, the first week of May, with a plan.

Cornelia and I are away for a few days in Utah—I’m giving a speech and we are celebrating our seventeenth anniversary. As a full-blooded ninth grader, in the springtime of his young life, it’s a golden weekend.

And—as we find out some time later—he’s committed to make the most of it. He’s really stretching his legs these days. Works hard at school—Sidwell’s an intense place—but he’s got his guys, his gang. His friends are hugely important to him; they’re his brethren. He loves his real brother, but that’s not always easy. It’s hard to connect with him. Walt hoped it might get easier when he and Owen got older, but it really hasn’t. We tell him just about every-thing concerning Owen, and he’s forthcoming about lots of things; more than most kids tell their parents, but there’s plenty that goes on that we’re sure we miss. We go to everything all the other parents do—the school assemblies, PTA nights, the football games. Cornelia even runs quite a bit of it, a display that we’re like everyone else, only more so. But we’re so busy with Owen, Walt can slip away sometimes. He’s always been an independent guy. He can take care of things.