Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  Driving to a Cape Cod hotel that night—with Owen back at the dorm for his last night—Cornelia and I struggle to set boundaries.

  There are a dozen students in the Disney Club. Interest for next year is already growing as word spreads.

  “The idea is for Owen to run the club,” she says, as I check my iPhone’s directions.

  “Yes, that’s the goal,” I say tersely. She knows that Owen and I now have a call before each meeting. With activities, like charades or ten questions, and the all-important discussions, there’s time in a ninety-minute club meeting to watch about five key scenes. Owen chooses the scenes and explains to me his rationale, in relation to each movie’s big idea, which he explains to the group at the start of every meeting. He controls the remote. But, she’s right, I’m mostly in charge.

  “Right now he and I will run it together,” I say. “And my hope is eventually he’ll take it over.”

  “Just want to be clear about that,” Cornelia says.

  “Clear,” I confirm. “And we went completely overboard with this party,” I add. “No one was expecting that.”

  She nods. She goes overboard. That’s what she does. A woman who does not compromise.

  “We just have to keep it in balance,” she says, after a bit. “Do what we need to do to support him, and give him as much independence as we can.”

  “Clear,” I repeat.

  But it’s not—and not likely to become any clearer. We’ve caught a wave, a new one. We and Owen are sitting at its crest. We felt it today. The ardor and enthusiasm of the parents; the complex relationships of the kids, all playing out. Owen and Emily, nuzzling in the thick of it. After countless hours watching Disney movies celebrating romance, the two of them are discovering what the fuss is all about. And, beyond that, we’ve reentered Owen’s life at a time when he needs to separate from us.

  So we hash it out, running the old calculus of same and different, of where the conventional playbook of parent-child relations becomes different because of autism.

  And, for that matter, where it’s made our marriage different than it might have been.

  It made Cornelia and me a team in a kind of holy war, where we’ve lived and loved side by side. You create a life with what’s in front of you. Hopefully, by animating it with love. Owen did it. Walt, certainly as well. And we did it, too. We’ve never been much on the future. Gave that up, long ago. We just hold on tight, thankfully, to each other.

  As the station wagon loaded with hors d’oeuvre trays and half-full juice bottles bumps along through Hyannis—just now waking to the start of summer—we sit silently, with half-smiles of resignation. She reaches over to grab my free hand. And we ride the wave.

  Owen is up at an unreasonably early hour for a mid-July day. He’s had breakfast, showered, and, by 8:00 A.M., is dressed, going with a pair of khaki shorts, mesh belt. He tries on a few polo shirts before choosing one; ties on his sneakers, over high white socks, because, why not.

  The sun is burning off the last mist of morning from the lake, when he settles onto a porch chair with his pad and a sharpened number two. He looks out through the birch trees rising by the porch for a few minutes. And then:

  Dear Emily,

  Thanks for a great ending year at school. You have meant so much to me. You are the most wonderful, beautiful girl I have ever met, and the sweetest one, too. When we look at each other, it’s like a dream. You were so kind to me, I can’t help but feel good about myself. I’m so glad you and your family have come to our summer house in Vermont. I hope it’s been a great summer for you like it has been for me. Thank you very much. I love you with all my heart.

  Love,

  Owen

  She’ll be here today by noon. Or so that’s been the plan for almost a month. This is the long awaited midsummer visit. She lives in Scarsdale, outside New York City, but her family has a place up in Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont, about two hours north of our locale. He checks the time on his cellphone, but he doesn’t need to.

  He goes upstairs to his room for the coup de grâce. An hour later, as noon approaches, he emerges with an illustration for his card: a precisely rendered version of the spaghetti kiss from Lady and the Tramp.

  He has a whole day planned. Bike to his favorite place, the Whippy Dip, for grilled cheese sandwiches and ice cream. Maybe a ride around nearby Fairlee’s tiny downtown, and a stop at Chapman’s General Store. He’s hoping they’ll swim in the lake.

  Walt knows this is the long-awaited day and calls in. “I know you haven’t seen her in a month, but her mother’s bringing her. Don’t just walk up and kiss her. You’ve got to be cool.”

  Owen nods. He gets this, though he’s more concerned about her father. He mentions to Walt that in Disney “it’s very complicated with the fathers and daughters,” and ticks off a few—King Triton and Ariel, the Sultan and Jasmine.

  Walt doesn’t disagree. “I know Ow—the fathers. But it’s not that different with the mothers.”

  At eleven forty-five, Owen’s standing at the top of the driveway, pacing. Fifteen minutes later, the car pulls up.

  “Owen, I missed you!” Emily calls from the open window.

  He’s unspeakably happy to see her. But he hears Walt’s voice in his head. After a quick hug, he turns his attention to Emily’s mother and shakes her hand. “Hi there Missus Jathas. Welcome to our Vermont house!”

  And once Gabrielle and Cornelia enter the house, leaving Owen and Emily outside, he turns to her and they kiss.

  Now, he’s even unspeakably happier. Hand in hand, they walk into the kitchen where he gives her the card. It’ll speak for him.

  Rainy days can be good days for autistic young adults in old wooden houses.

  This finding is based on what we conclude a week after Emily’s visit to our thin-walled, 1889, asphalt-shingled lake house. Owen has a very good day, safe inside the dry house during a summer storm, where he tells us things we’d been waiting a long time to hear. Other variables may be in play, such as when this sort of weather occurs in conjunction with significant life events, but we see a pattern.

  Because the same thing happened a year before, in late August 2011, in a torrential downpour a few days before Owen left to start his first year at Riverview. He sat down and mapped out our whole life over a few hours. Cornelia and I could see a moment of clarity had arrived and we broke out notepads. His guideposts were the movies, mostly by Disney, that he was using at various times to make sense of the world. The animated world and the real one—those parallel planes we’d discovered when, at six, he first talked to Iago—were, in essence, laid flat on the table that day in Vermont, revealing an intricate machinery.

  Very matter-of-factly, he detailed all the ways they connected. The precision was astonishing, including the debut dates of a few dozen movies, when he saw them, which theater, who attended for what were often multiple viewings, release dates for the videos, and, more broadly, which animated videos from his library were helpful at key moments. Much of this we’d pieced together, bit by bit, across the years. Now, he offered a glossary of answers. But what surprised us was that everything real was just as carefully filed and slotted into place: family trips, what Walt was doing, where holidays were celebrated, schools, friends, therapists, and citations of particular challenges and victories.

  As rain pelted the roof (that was the stormy August of Hurricane Irene), he recounted our first days in Washington in 1993, when the autism hit full force and this whole apparatus began to form. He said he couldn’t understand anything we were saying—it was all “blabbering,” he said—and couldn’t tell us what he wanted. Cornelia asked if this was scary and frustrating. He seemed to turn inward. Living minute to minute as they do, autistic folks can sometimes go back to an instant and live it over. It was “weird,” he said, haltingly, and “also worrisome.” And that the only things that remained the same before and after the terrifying change were the Disney movies. With his auditory processing gone haywire, I asked him if h
e could understand any of the dialogue in the movies. He said he could over time, because the movies were “exaggerating” everything. Then he reeled off his dozen favorite animated films. Without those movies, “there would never have been me,” he said, and “I would have never talked a lot.”

  Now, a year later, we sit in the same room on another rainy summer day. Over Cornelia’s grilled cheese sandwiches (his ultimate comfort food and maybe another sensory variable), he talks about Emily’s visit, like he does most days, about how they rode bikes and waded in the lake. Again, underlying life events are at play—that he’s excited to start the second year of his college program. He loves his “funny and crazy” art teacher, and is excited to soon see his friends in Disney Club. His life—the one he wanted—is taking shape.

  Then, rather suddenly—unbidden—he begins to tell us what happens to the sidekicks in the dark forest.

  “There is a boy who is like other boys,” he begins. “He is happy and playing, with a mom and a dad, an older brother and friends. Until one night sees from his window a storm on the horizon. He is small, just three years old, and he’s scared.” Cornelia tells him to stop while I run to get legal pads, fearful, that he’ll say it just once and vanish. But he doesn’t. He’s settled—not going anywhere. After a few minutes, as we both take it down, it’s clear he’s ready, now, in some way. He describes how the boy—he calls him Timothy—gets lost in the storm, can’t return home, and is raised in a forest, a land of lost sidekicks.

  Why are they lost? “Their heroes have already fulfilled their destiny. They have no purpose.” They are, of course, the ones that have been important to Owen at various times of his life. “But there are villains in the forest, and they’ll have to face them without heroes,” he says, before describing a villainous trio, each corresponding to what he’s faced: a mischievous lord that “breathes fire into the boy’s head,” marking those early days when he lived deep in a fog of autism; a monster that freezes people and discards them, matching the difficult days when he was thrown out of Lab School; and finally a clever beast, “who tells lies so real that you can’t tell what’s true.” That would be his ordeal with the bullies.

  Other parts emerge, bit by bit. But easily, cheerfully—something he’s ready to unveil. “It is time!” he says—the line Rafiki utters upon discovering the long-lost Simba is alive as an adult lion, ready to fulfill his destiny—“time for the return of traditional hand-drawn animation!” He says that’s the way he wants his movie made, the old-fashioned way, though he knows both things—the making and the method—are long shots.

  Don Hahn, busy with many projects, has moved on. It doesn’t seem to matter to Owen. He’s lighthearted about it. As to the issue of hand-drawn being better, it’s both a philosophical and personal position. He explains in detail that you have “to feel the line to draw it right” and that when he began to draw he realized he could “see and feel with my fingers.” He’d once told us that animators used to use mirrors. Now, he goes upstairs and gets an old animation book to show us a picture of a Disney animator from the 1940s with a mirror on his desk. “They would make the expression in the mirror that they had to draw for the character,” he says. “It was to make sure it was right. They had to feel it to draw it. Like me.”

  This helps us see everything a bit more clearly: just how important mirrors have been to him his whole life. It wasn’t just metaphor. It was quite real. Those animated films were the mirror in which he found a way to eventually see himself. The movie concept is the logical next step—a mix of characters he borrowed from those movies to create an original story that reflects the true complexities of his life, right up to present tense. There’s even a character, he calls Abigail, modeled after Emily.

  Cornelia suggests that he write some parts down, and he does. But, over the coming days, it’s clear he likes to pace and gesticulate when telling the story, and asks us to take turns as his stenographer. He’s finally turned the imaginative lens fully on himself. A joy to watch.

  And it becomes obvious why he’s been “working on it,” as he’d often said, for so long. He had to live it, first. His story, like any story, had to arrive at this moment of closure and clarity; a retrospective view, which now—as a young man—he’s beginning to finally assume. Or, in the familiar parlance, you can’t write a coming of age story until you’ve come of age.

  Owen and I are driving over to Dan Griffin’s office for a rare visit. He saw Dan once on last year’s Thanksgiving break and Christmas break.

  And he may not see him again for quite a while. Cornelia and I have been swapping houses at the end of the summer. While she packs up the DC house—for either rental or sale—I care for Owen and work either at our Vermont house or in Cambridge. This week in August we flip, as she heads north to welcome a few summer guests to the lake and Owen and I return for his last few days in Washington, DC.

  And ours, too. Nineteen years ago, we arrived with headlong ebullience, a young family on an adventure. I’m not sure where those people went. Owen vanished the moment we arrived and, soon enough, we did, too.

  The people that grew to replace them are the ones who are now moving on. We would never have wanted Owen to face what he did, of course, but, as for the rest of us, we don’t miss those people, that discontinued version of us. Not anymore. As Walt said in his Tree Talk, Owen shaped us all. Not a blessing in disguise. Nothing disguised about it.

  As Owen and I drive through town, I’m full of citations—this happened there and plenty of “remember whens.” But, soon enough, he takes over the citations. And it’s not just because of his strong memory. He’s fitting together the details of his life, looking for the patterns that make it clear to him, pointing them out as we move.

  That’s where he and Walt played at the elementary school. This is where he learned to ride his bike. That’s where he went each morning to Patch of Heaven school. We drive by the Lab School, on a circuitous route—I need to run an errand—and he doesn’t just offer a few safe memories of this friend or that play. “I felt like I was in a kingdom, there, and I was banished,” he says, but with little emotion, far from it now.

  After we pass the Lab School, I can’t help but think of that replacement of terms—“learning differences” rather than “learning disabilities”—that we first heard at those glittering galas. Though it prompted Cornelia and I to roll our eyes about politically correct talk—we shifted quickly, seeing all those dyslexic and ADHD superachievers step to the podium. It was all about finding their hidden strengths.

  Lab, though, didn’t see Owen as similar to those storied achievers and, at the time, neither did we. Cornelia and I figured we’d never discover or help him develop abilities to counterweight his deficits, as so many of the learning disabled achievers could manage, with their less weighty challenges.

  But we’ve come around on that—a gradual acceptance, across years, that Owen is different, not diminished, capped by the debates over nuanced issues of villainy and virtue with him and his Disney Club members. It has affirmed for me and Cornelia the conviction that Owen, and so many folks like him, are, in essence, exactly like the rest of us, only more so and less so.

  The less so parts for those like Owen with autism are conspicuous characteristics that separate them from the wider world, and bring swift judgment about their limitations; the more so parts are often subtle and opaque, hidden. With Owen and the other kids in his Disney Club, we’ve learned that each person’s chosen affinity, their passion, no matter what it is, can be a pathway to reach them.

  Among the most surprising things we stumbled across was how important it was to Owen to accord respect to his affinity—no matter how seemingly narrow or arcane it may be viewed by the wider culture. It affirms his worth. To treat it only as a handle, to grab and pull him into something of our choosing, or twist his interest into an elusive reward, is demeaning.

  There’s a reason—a good enough reason—why each autistic person has embraced a particular intere
st. Find that reason, and you will find them, hiding in there, and maybe get a glimpse of their underlying capacities. Authentic interest will help them feel dignity, and impel them to show you more, complete with maps and navigational tools that may help to guide their development, their growth. Revealed capability, in turn, will lead to a better understanding of what’s possible in the lives of many people who are challenged. Affinity to Capability to Possibility.

  As the Disney Club members now say, it’s about “finding the hidden ears” and soaring past judgment—in their own mind and, hopefully, in the view of others. It’s not all that different from what Sally Smith did by celebrating her learning disabled achievers. Views changed. The learning disabled were seen as different, not less.

  As Cornelia and I were driving home from a Disney Club meeting back in late May, we discussed how angry we were at Smith—and remain so about Owen’s expulsion—but how we better understand her going public strategy.

  If the world could visit a few meetings of Disney Club, Cornelia said, it would alter the view of autistics, and so many others who’ve been discarded. They’d be seen, she said, with new eyes and that could change everything.

  As we enter Takoma Park, Maryland, and close in on Dan’s office, Owen says, let’s do “that love business.”

  Lately, we’ve been doing this at least once a day.

  “Okay, you do Merlin,” I say, which means I can do the young Arthur, who, thankfully, has only one line.

  “You know, lad, this love business is a powerful thing,” he says in Merlin’s reedy, old man’s voice.

  “Greater than gravity?” I respond as Arthur.

  “Well, yes, boy, in its way.” Owen pauses, considering it all, just as the wizard does in, this, probably his favorite of all passages. “Yes, I’d say it’s the greatest force on earth.”