Raising Cubby (16 page)

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.

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 wrote 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.

We started with the school psychologist. By a strange twist of fate, she’d taught Little Bear many years before and was now charged with evaluating our son. She said it was plain that Cubby had a reading problem, but she did not believe Cubby was “slow.” Cubby was able to solve complex problems, and everyone who heard him speak agreed that his command of language was extraordinary for his age. The psychologist seemed stumped about the cause of the problem. All she could recommend was more testing.

That was the last thing the school wanted to hear, because they had to pay for the evaluations. As far as we could tell, they preferred to simply label Cubby stupid or obstinate. But since the psychologist told them Cubby had a reading problem, they were stuck. Public schools have a legal obligation to make education accessible to kids who are impaired or have learning disabilities. The two things they don’t have an obligation to remediate are “dumb” and “stubborn,” so that’s what they wanted him to be.

To us, it was the school administrators who seemed stubborn and obstinate. Getting them to pay for a first-rate evaluation of
our son, as the law required them to do, proved very difficult. In fact, it was one of Little Bear’s greatest challenges as a parent. As they dragged their feet, the school year passed and his grades got worse and worse. Richer parents might have paid out of pocket for the testing, which was quite expensive, but we were barely making ends meet, so we were forced to wait for the school district to live up to its obligation. Some parents in our situation take the school district to court. Others give up on public education and homeschool their kids. It’s a shabby state of affairs that’s come about because our society hasn’t given schools the money to do what needs to be done.