Following Ezra (22 page)

“This is the dog,” Shawn says. The shelter lets the four of us walk the dog around the block. When we pause at a grassy sidewalk median, Ezra sits cross-legged and lets the dog lick him, and Ezra licks back.

I smile at Shawn. “This is the dog,” I agree.

The boys name her Sasha. Over time, I watch Ezra, eager to see how finally realizing his dream of having his own dog will transform him—hoping he will develop a close tie with the dog, unlike anything he has experienced.

I do see a change, but not the one I expected. Ezra reacts to dog ownership the way he responds to almost everything else he deems important: He steps up his cataloging. He amasses a mental storehouse of data about dog breeds, delving into the physical and behavioral traits that distinguish one breed from another. Just as he has mastered Disney trivia and animal almanacs, he scrutinizes a dog-breed guide, closely examining what distinguishes, say, a French bulldog from an American bulldog, a cocker spaniel from a springer. Occasionally he accedes to my requests to lead Sasha on walks around the block—the farthest we have ever let Ezra wander without an adult—but he is more enthusiastic about reciting the various categories of canines he has learned from his books: working group, hounds, terriers.

One afternoon we are walking Sasha together when Ezra spots a woman approaching on the sidewalk with a golden retriever.

“Is your dog friendly?” he calls, dashing toward the woman and dropping Sasha’s leash, completely forgetting about his own puppy. Sasha, still relatively untrained, begins making for the busy street.

“Ezra!” I call. “Your
dog
!”

I rush to grab Sasha, stopping her flight, but Ezra pays no attention, lost in the retriever.

Our family is attending a crowded picnic concert at a neighborhood park when I realize Ezra has vanished. I stand up and survey the throngs of families lazing on picnic blankets—I have scanned crowds this way so many times in markets and theme parks that my body does it almost instinctively—and finally spot him on a path fifty yards across the park, talking animatedly with a woman who has a smallish brown dog on a leash. Climbing over picnic blankets and around coolers and lawn chairs, I make my way over to him, ready to scold him for dashing away.

“Abba,” he says with excitement, ignoring my attempt to admonish him. “She has a Cardigan Welsh corgi!” He tells me he has never seen one before—except in books. “See! The ears are bigger than a Pembroke’s.”

The woman looks tickled.

“Not many people know the difference,” she says.

Ezra does, and the best place to demonstrate that is Rancho Park, just a couple of miles from our home, the place where, years earlier, I noticed dog owners letting their pets run free. We begin visiting, ostensibly to offer Sasha some exercise, but it is Ezra who discovers his own reason to go: He relishes simply being surrounded by dogs and people who love dogs. Elsewhere, he gets stuck in one-sided conversations focused on the same old topics—Pixar movies,
The Simpsons
—that few others want to discuss at length. Here, though, he has discovered something that changes his life: When he wants to talk endlessly about Burmese mountain dogs and Rhodesian ridgebacks, he is overjoyed to learn that so does everybody else.

Among other twelve-year-olds, gushing about muzzles and cropped tails might render him quirky. At the dog park, it makes him fit right in, delighting owners when he can identify uncommon breeds—the odd Hungarian vizsla, the occasional pharaoh hound—he recognizes from his books.

Just as he is fascinated by humans with unusual physical traits, he is drawn to any dog that looks distinctive—the Chihuahua missing a leg, the bulldog with one eye. When he spots one, he paces around, seeking the human who goes with the dog and then peppering the owner with questions: “How can she walk? . . . What happened to his eye?”

Over time, he becomes familiar not only with the park’s canine regulars, but also their human counterparts. Elsewhere, he is isolated, solitary, in his own world. Here he has found a place where he can be part of the pack.

Arriving at the park one afternoon I keep my distance as I watch Ezra and Sasha make their eager sprint into the park. I observe from a distance as my son joins the small cluster of strangers, chatting amiably and gesturing toward the dogs. And I think about the solitary toddler I once knew, gingerly handling toy zebras in the backyard.

“Gosh,” one of the women says to me when I catch up with them, “you’ve got such a social kid.”

I smile. Who am I to disagree?

CHAPTER TWELVE

The brain expands. This is what Ezra’s doctor tells us. At an appointment when he is eleven, Shawn mentions that we have started to notice how, in subtle ways, Ezra seems to be more aware of himself than before—perhaps more able to perceive himself in a larger context, in relation to other people. It’s as if he has been supernearsighted, a Mr. Magoo walking around in a blur, seeing only what’s closest. But now, occasionally he puts on glasses and sees the world clearly. “That’s the brain literally growing,” Dr. Robinson says. And then she repeats something she has told us before: “When these kids hit adolescence, all bets are off.”

Plunging toward the teen years, Ezra is the same boy: the child delighted by animals and cartoons, the kid who can become entangled in his own loops, the young man watching movies in his head. But he is also starting to grapple with larger issues: things like morality, and mortality, and God.

One afternoon, I get a telephone call from Ezra’s sixth-grade teacher.

“I just want to make sure you’re aware of something,” she says. “For the last couple of weeks, Ezra has been buying candy every day at the snack bar.”

“You mean with money?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Where did he get the money?”

“I think it’s his own. I just wasn’t sure whether he had your permission or not, but I thought you should know.”

This comes as a shock. Not the candy part: Ezra has long proven adroit at scaring up sources of sugar. Cookies, ice cream, yellow bags of Nestlé chocolate chips all routinely disappear from our kitchen with such consistency that we have often discussed installing locks on the pantry door. What’s surprising is that Ezra apparently is using money. We have given him a small allowance, which augments the dollars he collects from the tooth fairy and the occasional birthday check from his grandparents. But he has never demonstrated any understanding of—or even interest in—the mechanics of money. Handling currency is one of those elemental skills that other children pick up intuitively, but to which Ezra seems oblivious. So I had no inkling that my son understood the basic human transaction of exchanging paper bills and silver coins for stuff.

Until now.

Of course, the news is tempered by a troubling detail. Nearly all of Ezra’s money is in a bank account.

His younger brother, Noam, on the other hand, is a collector, accumulating Snapple caps, Hot Wheels cars, and my discarded digital watches in plastic bags and shoe boxes stowed in the crevices of his bedroom. All the more so with money, which he methodically socks away, week after week, with vague dreams of a deluxe Lego set or an iPod. He has been resistant to depositing his loot in the bank, preferring to watch the cash accumulate before his eyes.

As soon as I hang up with the teacher, I run upstairs to Noam’s room. When I pick up his money jar, I am alarmed to discover only a couple of crumpled dollar bills and a few nickels and pennies where there had been upward of thirty dollars.

My heart sinks: My son is a thief!

My imagination soars: My son understands money!

That afternoon, I’m driving Ezra on an errand, trying to figure out how to broach the subject. Finally, I just ask him.

“Ez, have you been buying candy at school?”

“Yeah, Abba!” he says, not even attempting to hide his excitement. “I can buy M&M’s and Oreos at the Snack Shack!” I am struck by his naive sense of enthusiasm and pride. Ezra has no idea that there’s anything wrong with this—with pilfering cash, with stealthily obtaining sweets, with hiding all of this from his parents. Or so it appears. Part of me feels irate that a school for children with developmental disabilities doesn’t present more of an obstacle between sixth graders and high-fructose corn syrup. Part of me is stuck trying to imagine the scenario.

“How did you get the candy, Ezra?”

“I gave them money!”

“Where did you get the money?”

“From my house.”

“Where?”

“From Noam’s room,” he says evenly.

I pull over to the curb, switch off the ignition, and turn to Ezra, sitting in the backseat.

“You took money from Noam?”

“Don’t be mad,” he says. “Be happy.”

I’m not happy.

“You know what that’s called?” I ask.

“Allowance?”

“Do you know what it’s called when you take somebody’s money?” Silence.

“Ezra, it’s called ‘stealing.’ ”

“Yeah, right! ‘Stealing’!” He sounds excited—as if he got a word right in the spelling bee. I have not come with a game plan, but I realize suddenly how important this moment is, this chance to make Ezra recognize the impact of his actions. I have learned over time that the best way to make him understand abstract concepts—like thievery—is to break them down into smaller pieces.

“Ez, do you understand what’s wrong with that?”

“I shouldn’t
steal
?” he asks.

“Of course you shouldn’t steal. Do you know why?”

“I could go to
jail
?”

“Well, yeah,” I say. “But what’s
wrong
with stealing?”

He has no answer.

“Have you ever heard of the Ten Commandments?” I ask. Ezra attends Hebrew school and he’s gone to synagogue nearly every Saturday of his life. His mother is a rabbi. I figure it’s a familiar phrase.

“Like, God gave Moses the two tablets at Mount Sinai,” he says, launching into the narrative, “and then Moses saw the golden calf and he got very, very angry—”

I interrupt: “Ezra, what are the Ten Commandments?”

He moans, resisting the interrogation, then offers an answer: “What Moses got on the mountain?”

“The Ten Commandments are rules from God. And one of the Ten Commandments says that you should never, ever steal.”

“Yeah, right,” he says, as if applauding my fine effort. “We shouldn’t steal.”

“So you broke God’s rules.”

“Are you
angry
?”

“It’s not about my being angry, Ez. When you stole Noam’s money, you broke the Ten Commandments.”

“They’re all broken now?”

The literalist. I try again. “Stealing is against the rules. You’re in trouble.”

“God’s going to
punish
me?”

“No, Ez.”

“Do I have to go to
jail
?”

“No, but you need to remember the rules. And there’s another reason. What’s another bad thing about stealing?”

Silence.

“Does stealing hurt anybody?”

“No . . .” he says tentatively. Then, looking at me: “Yes!”

“Does it?”

“Nnnn—yes?”

“Ezra, whom did you hurt?”

Silence.

“When you took Noam’s money, who got hurt?”

I wait. Silence.

“Come on, Ez. You hurt
Noam
!”

“Yeah,
right
!”

“Is that nice?” I ask.

“No, I should not hurt my brother Noam,” he says stiffly.

“You shouldn’t hurt anybody!” I say. “But when you steal, you hurt people. So what are the reasons not to steal? Number one?”

“Number one: It breaks the Ten Commandments.”

“Right,” I say. “And number two?”

“It hurts Noam.”

“Right—it hurts people. And there’s one more reason.”

“One more reason,” he echoes.

“When you steal, it makes people think bad things about you.”

“Yeah, right. People think bad things.”

“When you steal, it makes people think, ‘That Ezra—he must be a bad person.’ Are you a bad person, Ezra?”

“No, of
course
not!”

“What are you?”

“I’m a
good
person.”

“So you don’t want to steal, or people will think you’re a bad person.”

We review those three reasons. I drill him until he can recite the breakdown back to me the way he can reel off
Simpsons
characters or lemur subspecies: “It’s against the Ten Commandments; it hurts people; it makes people think bad things about me.”

After he repeats it a few times, I tell Ezra that I’m proud of him.

“People make mistakes sometimes,” I say. “That’s how we learn.” I start up the car and pull away from the curb, feeling pretty sure I have taught Ezra something he didn’t know half an hour earlier.

A few weeks later, Shawn and I receive an e-mail from the teacher. The message: Ezra has spent his lunch hour in detention. The reason: stealing. I get a sinking feeling. The scenario becomes clear: The school uses a behavior-modification system, rewarding good behavior with colored plastic chips that students can accumulate and cash in for prizes at week’s end or save for larger rewards. To me, Ezra has seemed oblivious to the entire system. But on this morning, the teacher tells me, my son spotted a container of the chips on the gym teacher’s desk—and procured a few handfuls for himself. Chagrined that Ezra has transgressed so soon after the allowance-stealing incident, I am still contemplating how to discipline him when his school bus pulls up to our house that afternoon and Ezra comes barreling through the door.