by Ron Suskind
Ariel is welcomed back to the group. Owen doesn’t notice. He’s looking at his brother. Walt and he high-five. “You’re the hero, Walter,” he says, “and the hero can do anything!”
Two weeks later, a dinner table conversation turns to a usual subject: Owen’s relentlessly stated desire to bring back hand-drawn animation and start “a new golden age of hand-drawn.”
We all listen. He’s passionate about this, the spoken corollary to a house full of drawings. It’s been three years since the drawing mania began, which means three sets of birthday and holiday cards for Cornelia and me. Walt has his own collection, too. Everyone wants to display them—they’re very personal works of art, with a character selected for the occasion, and written sentences of strong emotion from someone who has trouble expressing his feelings in speech.
Then there are the sketchbooks, rising toward the ceiling. There are dozens of them. We still don’t fully understand the nature of Owen’s joy, as he holds the pencil for hours, creating increasingly precise renderings of his sidekicks, now with an occasional villain or hero. What we can see is that his face, as he draws, usually mirrors the expression taking shape on the pad. The selection of what he draws—from the pantheon of hand-drawn characters—also often seems directed by what he wants to feel. Like the voices, it’s a form of emotional language.
The rest of the world, of course, is moving in the other direction. Since Pixar’s Toy Story hit theaters in 1995, the wave of computer-animated films has grown, unabated. They don’t seem to have the same effect on the autistic spectrum kids we know, though our random sample is modest. Owen watches them, and some he’s enjoyed, but they tend to leave him unrequited, so he returns again and again to the classics or embracing the few hand-drawn, like Home on the Range.
Cornelia and I hypothesize that the three-dimensional realism of computer animation may be too much like the overstimulating reality he faces every day. But there’s more to it. The hand-drawn characters tend to be more vivid in their expression of emotions; it’s precisely that exaggeration that breaks through to Owen, and did since he was small. That bond, from the days when he couldn’t speak, has endured. “I can feel those characters,” he says.
So, in the year since his bar mitzvah, this has become Owen’s chosen mission—the “return of traditional hand-drawn animation, especially from Disney.” He says that quite often, just like that—at least once every day or two. It’s almost a matter of civil rights for him; this chant, his version of “we shall overcome.” It’s not only that he sees, like most kids, what’s coming out in theaters and on DVD; he trolls animation Web sites online. He knows his hand-drawn world is shrinking.
Cornelia and I are deeply sympathetic, of course, and have an identical response: “Don’t worry Owen, hand-drawn will return.” He believes what we say—both his neurological grace and affliction—even as, in this matter of his deepest passion, and sole area of investigation, he recognizes that the prevailing judgment is otherwise.
Over dinner—a nice dinner in the dining room—we offer our “trust us, it’ll all be fine,” response; Owen digs in with a series of but whys (why did computer animation take over) and but hows (how will hand-drawn be revived).
Walt watches the back-and-forth enveloping another dinner. I know the events of Halloween night still echo in him. We talked about it a few nights ago, how Owen looked to him to find Megan; a kind of nightmare we’ve all had from time to time, about losing Owen, about him being hurt; and how Walt—who grew up wanting to be a fireman—felt that night ushering the silent girl to safety.
It wasn’t a long talk. Walt’s a busy guy. He’s a fully loaded, seventeen-year-old, testing the limits in the traditional trial and error, with plenty of adventures under way, beyond our purview. But the events of that night, and Owen’s hug, seemed to jerk him back.
“Listen, Owen,” Walt says, cutting off our “don’t worry” duet. “They’re practically putting out two computer-animated movies a week. If you want hand-drawn animation to come back, you’ve got to step up. Lead the charge. You’ve been into this animation your whole life. You got any movie ideas in there?”
Owen nods, showing he’s heard Walt, loud and clear.
His brother, his hero, is issuing a challenge. This is new terrain for Owen. He makes a face—lips pursed, chin out, eyes cast down—which we all know as a summoning expression, like the running start to a jump.
“I have one idea,” he says, tentatively. “Twelve sidekicks searching for a hero. And in their journey, and in the obstacles they face, each finds the hero within themselves.”
Walt lets out a whoop. We grab our glasses. Owen didn’t offer a title to his movie, but—as one—we all clink and toast, “To Sidekicks!”
Owen and I walk gingerly down the steps of a side entrance to Dr. Dan Griffin’s basement office in Takoma Park, Maryland. It’s a particularly cold and stormy afternoon in December 2005, the week before Christmas. A massive ice storm has just crept up the East Coast. But in all weather, this basement office has become a refuge, a safe place for Owen.
Dr. Griffin welcomes us with hugs, as always, and we settle into our usual chairs. Cornelia made a shrewd management decision when she started homeschooling, telling me the weekly appointment with Griffin “is your time.”
Owen started seeing the psychologist when he was thirteen, and Cornelia has been there many times herself. But she needs the break and, from the start, Griffin’s hyperkinetic, sometimes scattered style fits well with mine.
More than any other therapist, this psychologist takes hold of what, in essence, was a kind of “Disney therapy,” or more broadly, what might be called “affinity therapy,” that Cornelia and I, with Walt’s assistance, have been conducting for years in our home. He is regularly updated about ways Cornelia is using Disney scripts as a bridge to teach Owen broader knowledge, and creating a tailor-made educational toolkit at Patch of Heaven school.
In Dan’s office each week, we are trying to use the scripts to teach him social and life skills. One difference: neither Cornelia nor I are trained educators or therapists. But he, on the other hand, is a highly trained specialist, who’d been handling a flood of autistic spectrum kids, among a jammed patient roster, for fifteen years.
Like many other therapists we’d seen, Griffin was initially a little concerned about Owen’s intense affinity for Disney movies, but unlike the others he became intrigued. Griffin kept session notes which years later he shows us, and expands for us into a fuller account of his thoughts at the time. It is our first uncensored view of how a knowledgeable outsider sees us:
In talking early on to his parents about how Owen spends his time, I picked up that he really loves Disney movies—especially classic Disney, from the ’40s and ’50s, and hits from the early ’90s. They told me that since he had been very young his favorite activity was watching Disney movies and poring over them and then reenacting scenes. He’d had entire scripts memorized, and he could act out every part, and every voice. The intense narrow interest struck me as typical of many autistic kids. Other kids I’d seen had been very interested in cars, or Pokémon, or arcane areas of science and history. But Disney movies are different because they involve relationships and carry emotional complexity.
I decided I would experiment with trying to incorporate this interest early on, simply as a way to connect with a child who had difficulty engaging or expressing himself with pragmatic speech. I started by telling him my favorite scenes from old Disney movies and asking him to reenact them. It was something I could talk to him about. For example, I asked him if he knew the scene in Hercules when Phil is getting discouraged and made fun of as a trainer. He knew the scene and I was struck by how perfectly he remembered the script, and was able to recreate the voices. But even more surprising was how accurately he mimicked the emotions. In one scene, for example, Phil is disgusted with himself and Hercules is encouraging him not to quit. Owen seemed to really inhabit Phil’s despair and Hercules’ compassion an
d encouragement. Owen infused the dialogue with real feeling, as if he truly grasped the emotional significance of what was at stake. This kind of emotional acuity is generally not supposed to be an autistic kid’s strength. What I thought was especially cool was that he could shift from Phil to Hercules and capture each of their emotions.
One of the parents—I think it was Ron—mentioned to me that he had been given advice from several professionals to discourage Owen’s obsessive interest because it’s self stimulatory and avoidant—meaning he would use it to avoid social interaction and instead retreat into fantasy. I understood that that would be the professional consensus, but I remember thinking, and maybe even saying, “I’m not so sure.” Another option would be to use the movies as a reward for Owen behaving in desired ways, but I thought we could use them in a more integrated way. Often with kids like Owen you are only teaching them to survive in social situations, but his love for Disney could provide the extra spark to help him not just engage competently or without disaster but to actually want to engage. I had this hunch because he and I were so much more connected when he was acting out Disney. When we talked about the movies it felt so much less like work and more like joyous cooperation. It really made him happy to perform, and he seemed happy that I was interested. It was like night and day, compared to my other interactions with him. Before I’d seen him perform, he was polite, respectful, but he seemed “autistic” in the traditional sense—not consistently “there.” But when he was performing, he seemed totally alive and present.
My epiphany came during a session with me, Owen, and Ron. We were working on how you ask a follow-up question in a conversation. It seemed like a good skill to work on but we weren’t getting anywhere. Ron and I were playing the role of reporter and interviewee. We were plodding along dutifully, and Owen was obviously not interested. In an effort to wake us all up Ron and Owen broke into a Disney dialogue. It was a scene from Aladdin involving Jafar, and I was blown away at how good Ron was at acting out the scenes. What struck me was, not only did Owen come alive, but Ron came alive in a way I hadn’t seen before, and the connection between them was electric. I noticed so much joy, intensity, spontaneity, laughter, and they seemed much more organically connected. The room crackled with sparks of delight.
The aha moment that Dan refers to actually happened with me and Owen at a session three months ago, in September 2005. The very next session, I gave Dan a full description of Owen’s views about sidekicks and heroes, his role as “the protector of sidekicks,” and how he seemed to be using this narrative construct to shape his identity. He was clearly transposing his deepest feelings, his fears and aspirations, on the sidekicks.
By early October, after several sessions riffing Disney with Owen, Dan came up with an ingenious plan for Owen to protect and advise a sidekick. After a few discussions, we decided on Zazu, the proud but naive hornbill charged with protecting young Simba in The Lion King. Owen, in an exchange, said, “Zazu has a lot to learn.”
It was decided that Owen would teach him…as a way of teaching himself.
Hence:
Educating Zazu
I, Owen Harry Suskind, agree to undertake the challenging but critical task of providing stimulating educational experiences for my good friend Zazu. This project will take a good deal of work and preparation, but should be a lot of fun and also immensely beneficial to Zazu. I agree to do this for the academic year of 2005–2006.
Areas of Zazu’s learning program shall include, but will not be limited to:
1. Life in the world
2. How to concentrate
3. Following directions
4. Health
5. Asking questions
6. Making friends
7. Fun
8. Loving people
9. Science
10. Helping others
Signed, _______________ Owen Suskind
Witness _______________
Witness _______________
Owen signed the contract with much fanfare. Dan and I signed as witnesses.
We start today’s therapy session in early December, with talk of Zazu and his progress. Today, the focus is on Contract Item 6: MAKING FRIENDS.
Owen doesn’t have friends, other than through carefully structured activities: he sees Nathan, our neighbor, one evening a week at our house for an art class. Their meetings are facilitated by a twenty-something media-arts guy from the Lab School, a large, happy Wisconsinite, who helps the two boys make a short animated flipbook. In Dr. Gordon’s social skills group, he also sees Brian and Robert, two autistic spectrum boys who are also really into movies.
But when advising Zazu he suddenly seems full of advice about how to make friends.
“To make a friend you have to be a friend,” he says, picking up a line that’s used at Walt’s summer camp; it’s something Cornelia has said to him a few times but never heard him repeat.
“And you need to be interested in what they’re interested in,” Owen has added. “And then they can be interested in what you’re interested in.”
These are sentences Dan might have heard kids say many times in his career. But what makes this moment special is that Owen seems to infuse the advice with feeling. Instead of just repeating these chestnuts about social skills, Owen seems to really be owning them. Dan keeps up the momentum by bringing up the “Second Question Rule”—for keeping a conversation going with a more narrow question: “When did you do that? Who else was with you? How did that feel?” We practice a few of those, all three of us.
Owen mentions how Zazu has trouble with Contract Item 8—Loving people—because he’s “ashamed about how he failed Simba,” who slipped away from the hornbill’s watchful gaze and got into trouble—trouble that eventually led to Mufasa’s death.
For the past few months, Dan—who has two small children—has been brushing up in his off hours on Owen’s favorites. Dan takes the risk of asking Owen to elaborate about the fairly complex dynamic between Zazu and Simba—when you fail to meet your own expectations, and disappoint someone you care about, what does that feel like? As Owen is thinking, I mouth “P-h-i-l” to Dan. He knows immediately which scene I’m thinking of, and asks Owen if this is what happens to Phil in Hercules:
Owen starts to laugh. “Can I do it?”
Before we can nod, Owen’s off and running, doing all the parts in a scene where Phil is trying to tell a crowd of doubters about Hercules’ potential:
PHIL: THIS KID IS A GENUINE ARTICLE.
MAN: HEY, ISN’T THAT THE GOAT-MAN PHILOCTOTES WHO TRAINED ACHILLES?
PHIL: WATCH IT PAL!
STRONG MAN: YEAH, YOU’RE RIGHT. HEY, NICE JOB ON THOSE HEELS! YA’ MISSED A SPOT!
PHIL: I GOT YOUR HEEL RIGHT HERE! I’LL WIPE THAT STUPID GRIN OFF YOUR FACE! YOU—
HERCULES: HEY PHIL! PHIL! PHIL! TAKE IT EASY, PHIL.
STRONG MAN: WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY? SHEESH.
HEAVY WOMAN: YOUNG MAN, WE NEED A PROFESSIONAL HERO. NOT AN AMATEUR.
HERCULES: WELL, WAIT. STOP! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO PROVE MYSELF A HERO IF NOBODY WILL GIVE ME A CHANCE?
Dan would later cite this moving moment in his memo, and talk about how surprised and touched he was that Owen could access the emotions of Phil, Hercules, and the three other characters in that scene.
As that day’s session ends, Dan pulls me aside. “Autistic kids like Owen are not supposed to do that—this is getting weird in a very good way.”
Cornelia ducks into my studio office behind the house and puts Owen’s black-and-white composition book on my desk. It’s late February 2006.
I can tell it’s a good urgency—to report something hopeful.
“Read this. Last entry.”
I open to the book’s last page. She asked Owen to create a story, with himself as the character.
“A boy is fearful of his future and what his life will be like…” the story begins. It has a few twists along the way, as the boy wanders into a forest and finds a stone, a magic stone. Ti
lt it toward the sun and it becomes a mirror in which the boy can see the future. The boy loves the stone. He sees many possible futures for himself, all of them exciting. But then crossing a river the boy slips and loses the stone.
“But it’s okay,” the story finishes. “He doesn’t need the stone anymore, now that he knows his future will be bright and full of joy.”
“I think he’s ready to go,” she says.
“I think you’re right. Are you ready for someone else to take over?” I respond.
She smiles. She talks about how she was dreading this, before it began, how it’d devour her life. “I realize I’m going to really miss it. Just the two of us, making our way. But he’s ready. This is what we’ve been working for—for him to join the rest of the kids.”
The next week—the first week in March 2006, a few days before his fifteenth birthday—we tell Owen that he’ll be interviewing at the school we’ve been angling toward in Rockville, Maryland, called the Katherine Thomas School (KTS). It has a new high school program, which was just started last year by the former assistant director of the Lab School’s high school, Rhona Schwartz. The school, which Schwartz is the director of, is much like the Lab, but more inclusive of more types of kids, with about one-third of them on the spectrum.
It’s very small—only about forty kids—but due to grow, or so Rhona Schwartz, tells us on our visit with Owen. She takes us on a tour. It’s a spacious building, only half-full, and we can see Owen, nodding, checking the boxes of what represents school to him: classrooms, library, science lab, music room, art studio, gymnasium, and principal’s office, where we settle for a chat.
Rhona, having worked under Sally Smith, knows just who she’s looking at with Owen. The school, set up to handle ninth through twelfth graders, currently has only the first two grades filled. In the fall, Owen would be in the third class of ninth graders, she explains. “Would you like that, Owen?”
“Yes!” he says, with a plastered-on smile. “I think this is the place for me!” We all chuckle. I’ve never seen him in this mode, like a salesman looking to close a deal: settled, clear-eyed, sort of charming. Cornelia’s looking bemused, behind which she’s thinking what I’m thinking: he must really, really want this. Rhona tells Owen and us that he’ll come back for a day so he can be observed, “just to make sure this is the right place for you.”
