Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  Could I find some trains for Cubby? I wondered …

  Steam locomotives were long gone by the time he was born, but Conrail ran its big GE diesels right through Springfield every day. In fact, they had a terminal less than twenty miles from our house.

  “Cubby,” I said one day, “would you like to go see some trains?” “Yeah,” he said, bouncing a good six inches off the floor with excitement. So we climbed into the car and headed south for Springfield. All the way, Cubby asked me about trains. What did they do? What did they look like? Could he drive one? Could he take one home to keep? I realized Cubby did not have a good grasp of what we were about to see. Some things are just beyond imagining, especially for a toddler.

  Rolling down Memorial Avenue, we could see the train yard to our right, running for half a mile alongside the road, filled with hundreds of boxcars, tank cars, gondolas, and even rail cars loaded with new automobiles. They call those auto-racks.

  Unfortunately, seeing was not the same as entering. Try as we might, I could not find an entrance to drive an automobile into the yard. Yet I knew there must be a way in, because I could see workmen walking around, working on the trains. We finally spotted the entrance, across from the Big E Fairgrounds. We drove into the yard, bounced over some unused tracks, and parked next to a dirty gray shed.

  We had found our train yard. Right in front of us, two engines rumbled at idle. “Those are smaller switchers they use to move cars here in the yard,” I explained. Beyond them, on the long track out of the yard, five enormous GE mainline locomotives sat waiting. “Those engines have over three thousand horsepower apiece. They’ll need five of them to get a heavy westbound train over the Berkshire Mountains.” Cubby was impressed.

  Over the next few years, we visited the West Springfield yard more times than I can remember. We made friends with the train boss, who presided over the yard from his perch in the shed. Engineers and workmen would come and go as Cubby watched close and said little. In time, he became something of a mascot to the guys in the yard, and they let him have the run of the place. Cubby was very safety conscious, never once losing a leg or even the tip of a finger. He knew trains could flatten quarters like pieces of paper. That was enough to keep him well clear of the wheels and tracks and do his watching from a safe distance.

  One day we were watching the men move cars around the yard when the engineer stopped his big diesel right next to Cubby and climbed down. “Would you like to drive the engine?” he asked. Cubby grinned and leaped straight up the ladder and into the cab. The engineer explained the engine’s controls. Cubby listened closely, and in a moment he was ready. Cubby and the engineer moved the reverser lever forward, released the air brake with a hiss, and pushed the throttle forward a step. With a rumble and a clank, the locomotive began to move. Cubby wiggled his ears and looked out the window. He was driving a train!

  With me as a passenger, Cubby and the engineer moved freight cars between the main yard and a siding in East Springfield. Our trip took us back and forth across the Connecticut River and through the Amtrak commuter terminal. We waved at the passengers and Cubby blew the horn. It was quite an adventure.

  Now our appetites were stoked for even grander adventures in locomotion. We began to wonder: Were there more train yards out there that we could see? Maybe bigger or better ones? We had driven past some huge rail terminals during our journeys to Boston and New York, but they were surrounded by fences and guarded by police. They weren’t open, like West Springfield yard. We needed a way in.

  In fact, we needed a way into more than just train yards. We needed an entrée into all the facilities where good things happened: quarries, nuclear power plants, and even the Boston seaport. All those places were full of machinery and fascinating things happened inside, but ordinary people could not get in to watch. Somehow we had to become something other than ordinary.

  The answer hit me out of the blue one day: We would become owners. Owners cannot be refused admission or thrown out. Owners are not trespassers and they are certainly not ordinary. They are a class unto themselves. I explained it all to Cubby. “You have the general public,” I said, “and then you have the owners. Owners get to go inside and see all the neat stuff, because they own it.”

  Cubby understood my solution immediately, and together we conceived a plan. We would buy stock, beginning with railroads. People who own stock are called stockholders, and stockholder is just another word for … owner. I had a few stockbrokers as customers at work, so I called one and asked what shares of our local railroad might cost. The answer shocked me. I could buy a piece of Conrail for less than one hundred dollars! Being a big spender, I immediately bought ten shares in Cubby’s name. The certificates arrived a few weeks later, along with a whole bunch of printed material expostulating on the performance of the railroad. Our railroad. Cubby couldn’t read any of it, but he certainly admired the pictures. He immediately spotted some key differences between the images in the brochure and observed reality in the West Springfield yard.

  “Those trains are cleaner than ours!” Even at that age, he recognized advertising spin.

  “Yes,” I explained, “they photographed specially cleaned and detailed engines for the reports. Our West Springfield yard is filled with dirty workingmen’s engines.”

  Cubby thought about that a minute, and said, “I’ll bet they have cleaner engines in the big-city yards. Let’s go see them!”

  That Sunday, we set out to test our new status. Armed with our investor package, we headed for Boston. Our destination was Conrail’s Allston container yard, a location we had previously been turned away from by gruff railroad policemen. “Things will be different this time,” I told Cubby. “Now we’re owners. Watch what happens.” Cubby studied the annual report as we rolled down the turnpike toward Boston.

  Having previously been refused admission in an ordinary car, we were returning in style, in our white Rolls-Royce. I was very proud of that car, and it showed. The dash was done in fine burl walnut and the upholstery was soft black leather. No mere carpets for our car—the woolen carpets were covered in fine sheepskin overlays, softer than any blanket. The engine was smooth and silent, moving the car with unmistakable grandeur. My Silver Shadow was thirty years old; a grand dame of automobiles. I was especially proud that I’d gotten her at auction for less than most people spend on a Kia.

  You get a lot more respect in a Rolls-Royce than you do in a regular car, no matter who you are. You may look the same, but when you step into that car, the world sees you differently. The car says you belong, that you’re not a trespasser. I was counting on that to get us by the guards at the gate.

  Just as I suspected, my idea worked like a charm. We rolled smoothly and silently right past the stunned gate guard, giving him a polite wave of acknowledgment as we passed, motored serenely into the yard, and parked next to the operations center. I unfastened Cubby from his car seat and we climbed out of our vehicle. The gate guard had followed us in, at a polite distance. I turned to him and said, “My son is a stockholder. Could you perhaps find someone to show him the facilities?”

  With those words, all the bluster and authority evaporated from the lawman. Instead of challenging our presence in the yard, he became what you might call cautiously deferential. He led us to the office, then he went to find someone with greater authority.

  In most places, the police work for the government. Not there. The railroad is one of the few places where you’ll find gun-toting cops who work for the company, which in this case was the Consolidated Railway Company—Conrail. And since we were owners (stockholders) of the company, that meant the railroad police worked for us. More specifically, they worked for Cubby, as he actually owned the stock.

  If you are a wise employee, you do not threaten the boss, even if he drives up unannounced and asks for a tour. If the boss looks a little weird, like maybe he’s just three feet tall, you do not make jokes or snicker. Not if you want to keep your job. This fellow knew what to do.
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br />   He returned a moment later with the general manager of the yard, who knelt down very seriously and ceremoniously and shook Cubby’s hand. He shook my hand too. He asked Cubby how much stock he owned, and Cubby smiled enigmatically. Was it ten shares or a million? He wasn’t telling. The manager commented politely on the finish of my Rolls-Royce, which sat next to a row of Conrail pickup trucks and an old Mazda sedan. I thanked him for complimenting my paint and refrained from explaining that I’d done it all myself. As my grandfather had taught me, it’s sometimes better to look dumb and rich than poor and resourceful. I also refrained from suggesting that I had probably bought my car for less than our railroad had paid for the Chevy pickup parked next to it. Such are the benefits of being a skilled mechanic with friends in banking.

  “This yard has an excellent safety record. It’s one of the best run in New England.” The manager was clearly proud of his operation, and as an owner, Cubby was naturally happy to hear that. “We’d be honored to see the place for ourselves,” I told him. He gave us hard hats and we embarked on our tour. But first our guide ducked into the office for a moment.

  In a display of prudence and wisdom, the manager hedged his bets by handing Cubby a Reese’s Cup, which my son accepted with the slightest of nods and all the dignity of a potentate. As Cubby chewed, he followed us on a memorable and detailed tour of the trains, tracks, and supporting machinery. We particularly enjoyed seeing the loading and unloading facilities, especially the container cranes in action. Those articulated monsters took containers from the backs of trucks and set them onto special railcars. “We’re very proud of our new intermodal terminal,” he said, as we both nodded in agreement.

  Cubby enjoyed seeing the newest GE locomotives parked on a siding. As he observed, they were the same model as the ones in the annual report, but a little dirtier. Big engines like those passed through Springfield without stopping most days. These are neat, he said, with wonder and admiration. And best of all, they were his, thanks to ten shares of stock. Knowing that, I was glad the engines were so large. Otherwise, he would have asked to take one home and I don’t know where we would have put it.

  Cubby was impressed by that day, on many levels. First of all, he enjoyed seeing new things, and the Boston rail terminal was full of new and exciting stuff. But more than that, he was impressed by the idea that we could gain control of it all with a simple phone call to a stockbroker. Luckily for me, he had not yet mastered the telephone, so I retained some measure of control.

  Once we were home, I investigated other places we might go, and how to buy their stocks too. Before long, we owned Northeast Utilities and all the power plants and power lines of New England. We also acquired Mobil Oil, American President Lines, and by extension, many big buildings and most of the cool ships in Boston Harbor. We even purchased United Airlines. For a few thousand dollars, we were on top of the world, and we made the most of it.

  Many doors were opened for us. It may be hard to imagine in today’s world of terror threats and hypersecurity, but in those days trains, trucks, ships, and planes were mostly out in the open, and anyone could walk up and check them out. So that’s what we did. We toured the Port of Boston, where Santa’s father had worked a container crane. Across the harbor, we visited the big Boston Edison coal-fired power plant. We saw the mountains of coal, some of which would be burned for power and some of which would be given to children for Christmas. We went into mines, quarries, and all sorts of places we didn’t belong. But thanks to our stock ownership and our antique Rolls-Royce, we remained safe. Never once was Cubby greeted with anything other than the greatest politeness.

  Sometimes we’d go west, to watch the trains cross the Berkshires on their way to New York and beyond. It was exhilarating to stand by the tracks as five or even six huge locomotives thundered past us at full throttle, pulling heavy trains over the mountains. After the trains had gone, we often stopped off to see Grandpa John and GrandMargaret. They lived about five miles apart, just ten miles from the famous Hoosac Tunnel. Each of them kept toys and treats on hand for Cubby, and they were always glad to see him.

  When Cubby got a little older, Conrail was bought by CSX, an even bigger railroad. The locomotives changed color, and the railroad got a more corporate feel. Many of the old-timers we knew at West Springfield retired or moved on. By then, though, we didn’t care. Cubby had also moved on, to new friends and hobbies. We still have the memories, and the money we made from the stock came in handy years later when Cubby developed more expensive interests.

  Cubby always dreaded going back to school after our adventures. When I tried to unravel the reason, I came up short. Finally I asked him if the problem was the other kids, and he said, “Dad, I show them things and they make fun of me.” That was such a sad answer. He was never bullied or beat up, but he was isolated. Hearing him made me remember how I’d been teased for knowing the answers when I was his age.

  Kids shouldn’t hate school, especially kindergarten and first grade.

  I recalled a day he was at the museum, looking at dinosaurs. A mom and her son walked by Cubby as he gazed up at a large fossilized creature. Directing her own child’s attention to the skeleton, the mom said, “Look, a triceratops!” Cubby’s eyes moved from the dinosaur to her and then to the little boy. He looked back at the mom and said, “It’s not a triceratops. It’s a protoceratops. See, it’s much smaller and it only has one horn. Triceratops has three.”

  He was right, of course. But when you’re a kid, being right doesn’t make you a superstar. Sometimes it just earns you a reputation as a know-it-all. I learned that the hard way. I wondered if that was one of his problems now. What do you say to a smart kid? Act ignorant? Be quiet? It didn’t seem fair.

  Firing off too many right answers or not fitting in weren’t the issues we heard about from Cubby’s teachers, though. “Jack doesn’t do his assignments,” they said. “He plays, and gets distracted, and when he does do the work, his answers are mostly wrong. He’s just not trying.” His mom and I saw him flounder and get things wrong, but we also saw his pain at failing, and we knew he was trying his best. We just didn’t know how to help him focus and succeed.

  Cubby’s challenges stood in sharp contrast to his gifts. For example, he had an extraordinary memory; he could watch a movie once and parrot it back to us word for word. My brother, Augusten, has that same ability, and it had helped him to establish a very successful career in advertising. (Today everyone knows my brother as the author of Running with Scissors, but back then he was just a guy in an ad agency, his first book still a few years in the future.)

  “He’ll be fine,” my brother reassured me. “You dropped out of school in tenth grade and I quit school before that. We ended up okay. He will too.” As much as I appreciated my little brother’s reassurance, I sometimes confused his carefree attitude with irresponsibility. After all, I was the one with the kid, and I wanted Cubby to do his schoolwork, get good grades, and graduate with honors. Those were three things my brother and I had never accomplished.

  There was no mistaking the way certain things we took for granted totally passed our Cubby by. Reading was the most obvious example. We didn’t know why, but he just didn’t get it. Both his mom and I had been exceptional readers from a very early age, so our son’s difficulty was a real mystery to us. He just didn’t seem to be connecting with the words on the page, and from first grade to third grade it only went downhill.

  His first-grade teacher wasn’t much help. After watching our son struggle to read for the first half of the school year, she looked at him and said, “I guess you just can’t read.” And that was that. He didn’t read in school for the next two years.

  Writing was even worse. He had terrible difficulty forming letters and shaping them into words. His handwriting was jagged, rough, and barely legible. That, too, was a sharp contrast to my own remembered childhood. When I was his age, I spent hours at my desk writing out page after page of exercises in flowing cursive script. When I wro
te block letters they were as carefully formed as if they’d been typeset. Cubby, in contrast, could barely print his own name and he couldn’t write script at all.

  Was the school failing him? There is always a temptation to blame your kid’s failure on his teachers, or even on the school system. We weren’t sure. There was also the possibility that his performance was not really that bad; maybe our own memories of reading and writing were distorted. Perhaps we just weren’t as great as we liked to remember.

  Cubby’s teachers scuttled that idea for us. They didn’t know anything about either of us, but they did see how our son performed relative to his peers, and that was not encouraging. Neither his reading nor his writing was at grade level. The worst part was, they didn’t know what to do either. They just reported what they saw.

  Meanwhile, other educators saw our son differently. Cubby often accompanied his mom to the university, and her professors got to know him pretty well. “He’s got a rare intellect,” her adviser told her when Cubby was just seven. Indeed, he could solve shape puzzles as quickly as her professors. Why couldn’t his elementary school see that?

  Things got worse as the school year unfolded. The teachers wrote out assignments on the blackboard and he ignored them, or copied an incomprehensible jumble on his page. Little Bear and I could see what he was doing wrong, but neither of us knew why. His teachers believed he was deliberately uncooperative, because he understood many complex concepts with no trouble at all. He was way ahead of the other kids in math. And his vocabulary was nothing short of extraordinary. When he failed to do simpler things, what could they think except that he was obstinate? Smoke curled from my ears when they expressed that sentiment. I recalled all too well my own teachers saying the same things about me. They hadn’t been true, and Little Bear and I suspected they weren’t true about our kid either. We were sure of only one thing: Cubby was not deliberately refusing to do his work. He wanted to do well. Luckily, he had Mom on his side, because I was too frustrated to be effective. She was a tireless advocate for our son, insisting the teachers find out why he was struggling. Finally, the school agreed to test him in an effort to determine exactly what was going on.