Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (18 page)

Originally I had written lines leading up to these, but somewhere along the way Eeyore had forgotten the words and I had forgotten the melody and we ended up singing only the refrain. Over time, the song came to serve as a signal of acknowledgment between Eeyore and me. “Do-oo-n't fret,” I would begin singing, drawing out the first words, and from whatever corner in the house he may have wandered into Eeyore would appear, timing himself to arrive at my side as I finished, “Ee-ee-yore's here,” and say, extending an arm to touch me as though we were a tag team in a wrestling match,
“Thank you very much?”

The origin of our game was spontaneous, it was not something I had contrived with a purpose in mind. I would sing the lines offhandedly, as if to myself—“Don't fret, nothing to fear, not when my dear boy Eeyore is here”—and Eeyore, hearing me, would return to my side and respond with
“Thank you very much!”
and an exaggerated gesture to go with it, and that was all. I do recall that just about this time, whereas until then he was rarely out of my sight, burrowing under my desk while I was working or waiting at the front door for the sound of my returning footsteps when I went out, Eeyore had begun discovering things to do all by himself in out-of-the-way corners of the house. Before long, I had begun using our song, not always but often, as a means of summoning him to my side when he failed to appear when he was called.

Next door to my study in his bedroom, having laid out a change of diapers, my wife is waiting for Eeyore. But he dawdles downstairs, listening to music on an FM station or thumbing through a sumo magazine in the family room. I leave my desk, walk to the head of the stairs, and sing: “Do-oo-n't fret, nothing to fear, not when my dear boy Ee-ee-yore's here.” Instantly, Eeyore sheds his lethargy and comes bounding up the stairs to slap my open palm exuberantly.
“Thank you very much!”
And the changing of the diapers is accomplished without incident.

This procedure of ours was invariably so effective that when I left the family in Japan and was staying in Mexico City I began humming “Do-oo-n't fret” and stopped myself short. If I sang the refrain, I feared that Eeyore might find a way to travel a quarter of the way around the world without a thought for the distance separating us and arrive at my side in a sad state of exhaustion after his monthlong ordeal to slap my hand as I stood there dumbly and shout
“Thank you very much!”

Our other procedure was unmistakably intended as a form of chastisement. Unless he was responding to an invitation to do something that suited him, such as listening to music, my son moved only in slow motion. When told to do something or to stop doing something he complied sluggishly (to be sure, it took time for him to comprehend what it was he was being ordered to do and to take action, but that wasn't the whole story). And so, when his mother had asked him to wash his face and put on his shirt and pants and he showed no signs of moving, an almost daily occurrence, I turned to him and began to count: one, two, three, four … Most of the time, Eeyore was on his feet by the time I got to “six.”

I counted playfully. But if I seemed too amused and the count advanced to the point where it began to appear that Eeyore's lethargic progress toward action was slowly driving him into a corner, the specter of “punishment” turned the situation grotesque. There were times when I got as far as “twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,” and still Eeyore had failed to do as he had been told. Obviously, I would never strike him, but the natural and unavoidable development was that my aggravation became audible in my voice as I counted and threatened him.

When Eeyore has failed to get enough sleep he is likely to have a seizure that may or may not be a symptom of epilepsy (my wife and I disagree about this), especially during the morning, when he loses his sight for a minute or sometimes two. It is important that we get him to bed by eight-thirty. The problem is NHK's
Classical Favorites,
which begins at eight-fifty. If we can get Eeyore into diapers before eight-thirty, he resigns himself to going to bed, but when his mother becomes involved in something else, such as talking on the phone to other mothers at his special school, and fails to summon him to the bedroom by eight-thirty, he will do what he can to stall for another fifteen or twenty minutes. He may try moving in slow motion to and from the kitchen with the glass of water he needs to take his antiepileptic pill before bed, or he'll pretend to have mis-buttoned his pajamas and painstakingly button them again. Meanwhile, his mother's voice summons him repeatedly from upstairs, and when at last he does start up the stairs he may turn around halfway for one more trip to the bathroom and then arrange to pass in front of the TV on his way back. If
Classical Favorites
should happen to come on at that moment, he will become an immovable boulder in front of the screen, and so there is no choice but to begin counting before that occurs, in a manner that is clearly a warning from the outset, “one, two, three, four …”

One Sunday, a few of Eeyore's younger brother's friends were playing at the house. They were aware that something about their friend's big brother was at variance with their own normality, but with the politeness that was part of their middle-class upbringing they refrained from active investigation; in what appeared to be a natural way, they avoided looking at Eeyore. For his part, though he was irritated at their amusement about things that were a mystery to him, Eeyore contented himself with peering at sumo magazines and a Bach discography in the corner of the room where he always sprawled and did not attempt to join in their games. Presently, I went upstairs to my study to work, and when I came back down, although my wife and daughter were not aware of it because they were preparing to change Eeyore's diapers, a bizarre situation had developed.

Eeyore's brother and his friends had assembled a set of Merculin electric train tracks in a circle that occupied half the family room. The tracks were old and bent (and some of the joints were broken) and fitting them together must have been a difficult task. Nonetheless, the locomotive was chugging around the round of tracks pulling a freight car behind it, but the children appeared distressed. The problem was Eeyore: inside the circle, his large rear plunked down between his legs in his customary manner of sitting down, his head thrust forward as if he were preparing to snatch a playing card from a deck, he was glaring at the transformer with one hand poised menacingly in the air in front of him. His brother's friends were pretending to be engrossed in watching the train circle the track; his younger brother sat facing him across the transformer, his own body thrust forward somehow defiantly though it was only a third the size of Eeyore's hulk, and he seemed to be taking the brunt of Eeyore's hostility. It appeared that he hoped to alter the course of the situation by maintaining resistance if possible.

I understood at once the source of the tension that had led to this curious stalemate. Moving the lever on the transformer in the + direction caused the train to accelerate. Naturally enough, moving it the other way decreased the voltage and caused the train to slow down and finally to stop. When the lever was depressed further, past zero to 5, the current reversed and the train began to move backward. But for just an instant, when the lever reached the
S
mark, the transformer buzzed. Eeyore was hypersensitive to certain sounds, and this buzzing was apparently one he found difficult to endure. In fact, we had packed up the Merculin train set and stored it away in the shed for just this reason. The boys must have found it there that afternoon and Eeyore's brother, in his eagerness to accommodate his friends, had apparently assembled the tracks and begun playing with the train without stopping to recall the effect of the transformer noise on Eeyore. The boys had sent the locomotive chugging around the tracks exuberantly—until a few moments ago I had heard their excited shouts and laughter in my study upstairs—and when they reversed the lever to move the train backward and the transformer had buzzed, at that instant Eeyore must have intervened with a nimbleness he rarely displayed. Positioning himself in the center of the tracks, he was now standing guard lest anyone try to so much as touch the transformer again.

“Want to listen to the new Glenn Gould in the other room?” I suggested. “If we take the amp from here, our other speakers will really sing!”

Eeyore looked up at me for just an instant and returned to guarding the transformer with immovable finality. Recently, we had observed this variety of intractability beginning to reveal itself as one of his standard attitudes: “There's nothing I can do to prevent myself from behaving this way so kindly refrain from trying to coax me out of it, you're wasting your time.” That sort of attitude. Sitting around the circle of the tracks, the boys faced the immovable mountain that was Eeyore, their eyes downcast, and I stood there watching them and trying to think of something more to say. It was then that Eeyore's brother spoke as he faced Eeyore defiantly across the transformer: “Papa, how about trying one-two-three-four?”

Before I could respond, his face flushing with his shame at having recommended that the threat of punishment be deployed against his brother, my younger son glanced around at his friends as though apologetically, already punishing himself, stood up abruptly, and went into his own room. Like athletes with no intention of reproaching a teammate even though his error had cost them the game, his friends rose and followed him without a backward glance at the tracks they had labored to assemble.

Eeyore continued to guard the transformer with one hand poised in the air as though in readiness for a rat that might leap out at him at any moment. Alone with him, I watched the train maintain a constant speed around the track. One-two-three-four: the procedure I had intended as a game was now perceived by the entire family, including Eeyore and his younger brother, as a technique for issuing orders that conveyed the threat of punishment. I felt like a tyrant who had resorted to disguised punishment to control my feebleminded son's disobedience out of a concern for what others might be thinking. A cruel tyrant!

If I were able to detect Eeyore's imagination at work in his spontaneous modes of expression I would be able to encourage him to develop it. I have had this thought since the days when he was listening to recorded bird calls, and I cherish it still. Currently, Eeyore finds pleasure in expressing himself through puns and composing music. He indulges in two varieties of word play, both related to television: puns on TV commercials and take-offs on specific individuals who appear as the stars of TV variety shows. When I was applying a plaster bandage to a boil that had developed on his side, he said, partially to thank me,
“o-deki kangeki!
” (boil, grateful!). This was a reference to the shout of joy in an instant-curry commercial that is delivered by a famous singer whose name is Hideki. On another occasion, when the American student I have written about was having dinner at our house, and my wife had been supplying her with the English names of the vegetables she was deep-frying and was at a loss to translate navy beans (
ingen-mame
), Eeyore volunteered a word in a manner that was plausibly English and might be transcribed as “
Ingen shim border!
” The earnest young woman confessed her ignorance of the word, but hastened to add that many plant names came from American Indian languages. I understood Eeyore's outrageous pun; it was a takeoff on a line delivered in a TV commercial by a sumo wrestler he liked:
Ningen shimboda
(Life is persevering!).

When he went to work on a musical composition, Eeyore began by writing “Composed by Hidan Toru” above the first staff on the score paper. He created his pen name by combining the first name of the composer who had always loved him as though he were his own son, “Toru,” and the epileptic-seizure suppressant he had to take every day, “Hidantol.”

On one of Eeyore's favorite programs, traditional storytellers responded with quips and puns to questions posed by the comedian who was the master of ceremonies. Replies that were judged superior were rewarded with a
zabuton
cushion. At the beginning of every program, the emcee lampooned the unshaven giant with a red face who was the bearer of the prize cushions, describing him with a series of comic metaphors full of grotesque leaps. Eeyore relished this performance, and eventually applied the technique to creating a name for an NHK sportscaster with a baby face and wide-open eyes and a shiny bald head: “The Kewpie doll who knows his sports.” Another example that will make sense only to sumo fans who follow the matches closely on television, and which may also require a note focusing attention on the connection between the color and feel of a poached egg and the shape of a tea cup, is Eeyore's choice of name for the sumo wrestler Hakuryu, “Poached tea cup.”

Eeyore's puns were not complex intellectual manipulations. The teachers’ notes from his special class at middle school included complaints about his frequent punning and requests that he be cured of the habit. Nonetheless, Eeyore had discovered a means of evoking laughter by separating words into their sounds and meanings and creating a distortion. And who was to say this was not an example, however trivial, of his imagination at work? When he encountered an image of a newscaster or a sumo wrestler on the television screen, he created metaphors in his own words to recapture those images. I prefer to think of this activity as the work of a bright and cheerful imagination. So what if his puns and comic metaphors were barren efforts, good for one-time laughter only, and would not add up to anything real in his daily life!

Shortly after Eeyore entered third grade, I learned that the wife of an editor I had known for many years was a piano teacher, and asked if she would give him lessons. Writers had been acknowledging their gratitude to this editor in new books and paperback editions that had been important to me since my high school days, and when he was finally assigned to me I was overjoyed. During the war years when he was growing up, he had suffered as a consequence of coming from a Christian family (with no affiliation to a particular church), and as an adult he lived a strictly principled life; his wife, Mrs. T, had her own singular views on teaching music that seemed to resonate with her husband's values. Though Eeyore's fingers were long and well shaped, he moved them clumsily, yet she did not focus on developing his technique. Her lessons were about creating a route to communication with Eeyore through music that sometimes seemed superior to my own relationship with my son.