Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  Like every explorer, Santa had heard of unicorns and winged beasts. But there’s a big difference between just reading about them and actually flying with mythical creatures. He and his crewmen held on tight. It was a long way down, and they were moving fast. It was as if the reindeer knew the way to shore all by themselves.

  Soon they came within sight of land and alighted at the boundary of grass and snow. The reindeer seemed tired, so Santa turned them out to pasture. Five minutes later, they were contentedly chewing grass with no sign that they’d just flown across fifty miles of ocean with several sleighs full of sailors in tow.

  The next day, the ship’s carpenter made wheels for the sleighs, and the reindeer pulled them all the way home to Boston. They arrived just in time for Christmas, and to celebrate his safe return home, Santa and his men spent the holidays delivering presents to the needy children of Boston.

  That was how Christmas got started, but it almost ended as quickly as it began. After the first Christmas, most of Santa’s former crewmen returned to sailing. He could never gather and hand out all those presents alone, but he was serious about his promise, so he started looking for help.

  “Where did he look?” Cubby asked.

  I told him that Grandpa Santa had opened a bar on the Boston waterfront called the Sailor’s Rest. In fact, it’s still there today. Cubby and I visited it on a number of occasions. We sat beneath the famous lighted Budweiser sign and admired Santa’s old whaling harpoon that hung in a place of honor above the cash register. He remembered that as I continued my story …

  Seamen of all sorts frequented the Sailor’s Rest. That was where Santa found the answer to his crew problems. They’d arrived by the greatest of good fortune on a cargo ship from Finland: elves. The Finns had been using elves as crew on their ships for years. The elves were small, so they could go places regular sailors couldn’t. They didn’t eat as much as full-size people either, and that made them less expensive to keep. Santa signed up an elvish crew and off he went!

  He sure made a strange sight when he headed out for Christmas: a fat old sea captain on a sleigh pulled by reindeer with a pack of seedy-looking elves following in his wake, handing out presents everywhere they went. The kids loved him, and the grown-ups just stared in wonder and shock.

  Santa’s fame grew with every passing year. By the turn of the century, he had a team of one hundred elves, and he could barely keep up with all the deliveries. Santa kept his presents in a warehouse right behind Boston’s Black Falcon Terminal. It was filled to the brim with toys the elves had liberated from ships that passed through the Port of Boston.

  The demand for toys is one of those things that never stop growing. When I was a kid, we played with sticks and rocks, and we were glad to have them. By the time Cubby came along, it took a hundred dollars’ worth of the latest toys just to keep a kid in a sandbox.

  I don’t know where parents would be if not for Santa. We sure are lucky his kids continued the Christmas tradition, even though the reindeer are only a memory. Years passed, and Donner, Blitzen, and the rest of the team got old and died. As they passed on, the memory of flight seemed to die with them. The younger reindeer didn’t even have wing buds! By the turn of the century, reindeer didn’t fly at all, but the original herd continued to grow, and there were more elves on the job every season.

  Today Santa’s great-great-grandson handles Christmas. He’s no longer in Boston, because he had trouble with the law over all the toys in the Black Falcon warehouse. There were allegations that some might be stolen, and of course there was the matter of customs duty. To avoid those troubles, he moved to Rotterdam, the busiest seaport in the world. There, from his perch atop a container crane, he spends the entire summer unloading ships and picking off the very best toys from the shipping fleets of the world. He calls what he does “liberation for the children,” while insurers write checks for theft and pilferage. Meanwhile, the elves stack the containers of toys and spend the whole year getting ready for an orgy of gift giving every December 25.

  I wish I could have shown Cubby the reindeer, but they were all gone by the time he was born. Modern elves, I explained to him, deliver presents in plain white vans. We’d see them driving around as holiday season approached. It was nice to see elves at work, but it didn’t feel the same. Two dwarves in a cargo van could never match the glory of costumed elves on a sleigh, even if they did have a full load of Pokémon cards or the best Yu-Gi-Oh! deck ever.

  Once the season started, Cubby and I made a game of spotting which vehicles were driven by elves and which were just ordinary vans. Cubby could always pick them out, or so he believed. “Maybe we could rob them,” he would suggest hopefully, as he imagined us hitting the Christmas jackpot. I always advised against it. Elves were cuddly, but armed dwarves were tough as nails. I warned him about that when we pulled up alongside one of their vans near my grandmother’s house in Alabama. You didn’t want to confuse jolly elves with vicious dwarves, especially at night.

  “Look close,” I told Cubby. “Check out the elves in that van. I’ll bet they work for Santa. They must be delivering presents.”

  Cubby looked over and saw the same thing as me: featureless gray glass and plain white sides. Were there elves behind that glass? Who knew? He decided to agree, because after all, Dad always (sometimes) knows more. “Yeah,” he said. “Elves. I wonder if they have anything for us.”

  Christmas was coming and we would soon find out. Grandpa John already had Cubby’s stocking out. “Which do you think it will be, Cubby?” I asked him. “Lumps of coal or fun toys?”

  Cubby glared at me. “Dad! Fun toys!”

  The winter of Cubby’s fifth year didn’t come with much snow and ice. Sometimes that happened in New England. We had years when the ground was covered three feet deep, and others where the grass was green on New Year’s Day. Cubby was too young to have much experience of winter, but I could already see that he liked clear ground for running and playing. Some kids liked huge snowfalls, but he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t want to crawl in deep snow or hide in snow castles. He wanted to run! That was something he did quite a lot of. He seemed to have two speeds, standby and full. He had yet to discover what older people call the middle range.

  He began running around the moment he woke up, which was my signal to get him out of the house so Mom could rest. She liked going out with us sometimes, but by Sunday morning she was generally pretty tired from taking care of Cubby all week while I was at work. That meant we usually headed out alone. It was a boy and his dad, out for adventure.

  I wasn’t as much of a runner, and I knew both of us needed food to start our day. That led to a tradition of Sunday brunch, and we usually chose the same place. I am, after all, a creature of routine and habit, and he was too. So we would climb into my old white Rolls-Royce for the fifteen-minute drive to the Depot Restaurant.

  I was real proud of that Rolls, and I loved to take Cubby places in it. Cubby liked it too, for the leathery smell and the soft lamb’s-wool carpets. I’d bought it the year before, when a bank foreclosed on a real estate speculator and they put his car on the block. I’d won the car in a sealed bid auction and had fixed it in my spare time at work. The ten grand I bid was a lot of money for me at the time, but I borrowed it from a bank, not a loan shark, and I paid it off within a year.

  My vintage Rolls was one of the first signs that I was finally making it. After all the money I’d lost, I sure felt I’d earned it. I was careful to keep that car hidden from my “partner” at work, because I knew he’d try to grab it for himself if he thought he could. Luckily, he went to Florida for the winter, so I had six months of relative freedom and I made the most of it.

  You could get breakfast plenty of places, but we liked the Depot best. Other places served pancakes and omelets, or strange and exotic things like boar’s snout with asparagus, but the Depot was the only place where you could get twenty strips of bacon and a plate of scrambled eggs. And then go back for more.


  Anyone with a powerful desire to eat could appreciate a place like that. As soon as we parked, Cubby would start bouncing. I’d release the buckle on his seat and he’d pop up and shoot out the door. In just a matter of seconds he’d be a hundred feet away, running through the parking lot as fast as he could and yelling “Come on, Dad!” I always worried that someone would run him over, but luckily that never happened. A few kids are lost that way every year; I was glad mine was not one of them.

  I’d round him up and lead him in the door, where there were enough distractions to keep him still for a little while. We usually started with the lobster tank. Cubby liked to make faces at the lobsters and watch as they snapped their little claws. (Most people just think of lobsters as dinner, but stick your finger in their tank, or mash your face against its side, and you find out pretty quick that they see us the same way—as food!) A few years before, the Depot had been a falling-down ruin, but a developer had restored it to a fine state of faux Victorian glory. There were new “antique” fixtures everywhere and a lot of exposed brick. Best of all, there was a sculpted steam locomotive protruding through the wall into the former lobby, which was now the dining room.

  Right near the train they had installed a rope. When you pulled it, the train’s steam whistle would sound. I never knew what ran that whistle, because there was no obvious source of steam, but it sounded a wonderful breathy hoot with every tug of the line. Cubby could not enter the restaurant without pulling the rope. Every time he did it, he’d grin and bounce. After two or three pulls, he’d be satisfied and allow the hostess to lead us to our table.

  We liked the tables near the fireplace, and the hostesses came to know and accommodate us. We rewarded their treatment of us with regular tips, and by never starting a food fight, no matter how much some of the other diners tempted us.

  I always felt like taking a nap after eating a big brunch, but Cubby was the opposite. He became even more energized. When that happened, I had a solution. I called it The Oxbow Run.

  We’d head down Route 5 to Island Road, the dead-end street that led to the marina where we kept our old Sea Ray cabin cruiser. Even though there was never much traffic on Island Road, it was paved, so it was an ideal place to run. The road ran half a mile up the center of a horseshoe formed by a cutoff loop of the old Connecticut River. The modern river course ran straight, on the left side of Route 5, with the old Oxbow slowly silting in to the right. There were nine houses on the right and eight on the left. The Oxbow Marina was at the end.

  When doing Cubby runs I always stopped in the same place—the little bend in the road alongside the first house. I’d let Cubby out and send him in front of the car. “Go, Cubby, go,” I said, and off he went!

  After all, I’d tell him, he had a tradition to uphold. I hadn’t run in years because I’d hurt my knee, but I’d been pretty fast at his age. My dad had been a star on his high school track team thirty-some years earlier, and Grandpa Jack—for whom Cubby was named—had run against Olympic star Jesse Owens back in the 1930s. We had Jack’s medals upstairs at home.

  Cubby ran up the center of the road with me following close behind in the Rolls. I had to drive carefully so as not to run him over, but I preferred that to the risk that some other car would flatten him if I were not up close and tight, guarding him. I knew it looked strange, but it worked. The mass of my car protected Cubby from any rearward assault. And anyone driving in the opposite direction was a lot more likely to see us because my car was so much bigger and more visible than a kid alone.

  Another benefit of following close in the car was speed measurement. The Rolls had a good speedometer marked with one-mile-per-hour graduations, so I could tell the difference between six, seven, or fifteen miles an hour. “Go, Cubby,” I would yell. “You’re only running eight miles an hour. A good horse can go almost fifty.” Hearing that, Cubby would speed up. The more I ran him, the faster he got. He never attained the speed of a quarter horse or even a quick dachshund, but he still got to where he ran at a good clip, compared to most humans.

  Most of our runs were uneventful, but one day we ran into trouble. Right before the marina there’s a big meadow where kids gather on weekends for soccer tournaments. The moms lurk at the edges, shouting exhortations at their kids and egging them on. They are an aggressive bunch, often fighting with the coaches, and sometimes with each other. It was one of those female warriors who gave us trouble. She saw us and stormed into the road, blocking our further progress.

  “What do you think you’re doing, chasing that child with a car? You should be locked up!” Cubby looked at the renegade mom with curiosity and puzzlement. He didn’t say anything—he was too shocked for words. I was pretty annoyed too. That wasn’t the first time I’d been upbraided by some sanctimonious adult over my seemingly marginal parenting skills. People like that irritated me because they had no sense of sport, adventure, or rational risk assessment. And frankly, it was none of their damn business.

  “I’m not chasing him. He’s running, and I’m following.”

  “You’re going to run him over,” she said accusingly.

  “You’re nuts,” I said patiently, “I’m protecting him with the car. Protecting him from crazies like you! Let’s go, Cubby.” With that, we swung ourselves and our car around her and ran the rest of the way to the marina.

  The mom remained in the road, glaring, obstructing whatever traffic might come after us. She was about five feet tall, solid, belligerent, with short curly hair, big round glasses, and a self-righteous expression. She looked like the kind of person who sat on sharpened fence posts to stiffen her spine, and she remained in sight till we turned the corner at the marina building. I wondered briefly if she’d call the cops or cause us more trouble, but nothing else happened, and she was nowhere in sight by the time we left.

  Cubby and I talked about the situation afterward, and we agreed, Little Bear would never have behaved like that. True, she wasn’t crazy about Cubby running in the road, but she had a totally different solution to his excess energy: She enrolled him in a weekly gymnastics class.

  That turned out to be a great idea. Our son was really wiry and strong, so many of the sport’s moves came naturally to him. Cubby often resisted trying new things, but he had such a good time in the gym that he wanted more. We began taking him twice a week, and I even stuck around to watch him.

  I was really proud of Cubby. I’d always been a clumsy kid, so seeing him on the balance beam, the rings, and the parallel bars was particularly impressive to me. He could balance perfectly on a beam, high above the floor, like a circus acrobat on the high wire. He could hang upside down from the rings and spin in a complete circle on the bars. “I could never do stuff like that,” I told him, and he smiled happily. He was thrilled to be “better than Dad.” His surprising prowess almost made me question my conviction that he learned just about all his skills by watching me.

  In fact, Cubby did so well that the coach invited him to join his team and compete against other schools. That was a big deal, because the Hampshire team was one of the best in the region, and one of its founders had competed on the U.S. Olympic Team. Joining also meant he had to practice three days a week, and we wondered if he’d be up to that commitment. He was. Cubby attended every practice and got better and better. The team was led by Cal Booker, a great young coach who really liked my son. Cal spent a lot of time showing Cubby how to do the various moves, and his attention paid off. Cubby might not have been a superstar, but he became a solid member of the team and he traveled with them to competitions all over New England. Looking back, I have to agree with his mom. Compared to running down the road, gymnastics was a much better way to burn off his excess energy.

  Best of all, the moms in attendance never yelled at me. They yelled at their kids instead.

  Cubby liked the people in his life, but he wanted more. There was a gerbil at day care, and he’d met a number of kids with pets. A few had cats, some had dogs, and one had a snake. He decided the answe
r for our family was a puppy, and he began agitating for one as soon as he turned five. Before agreeing to get one, I tested his intentions.

  “Would we feed him fattening food and eat him when he got big?” I asked.

  “No,” Cubby squealed. “He would be a pet. You don’t eat pets!”

  I was encouraged that he understood that concept. He was actually downright indignant that I would suggest eating the dog, even though he had never had a pet of his own. I didn’t want to eat our pet either, but I had to be sure he felt the same way. Pet care and protection must have been innate to his nature, because I was quite sure we’d never had a conversation about pet consumption before.

  “What would you do with a dog?” I asked.

  To my surprise, Cubby’s answer was immediate. “He would be my friend! He would play with me.” I wasn’t sure if that was really true, but his thoughts were in the right place, so I continued.

  What about feeding the pup? Cubby was very adamant. “I’ll feed him and take care of him!” I doubted the truth of that, but Little Bear was gradually getting on board with the idea, and I knew that being a mom, she would do most of the work.

  For his sixth birthday, Cubby’s mom resolved to make it happen. I have asthma and I’m allergic to many pets, so we needed a hypoallergenic dog. I wasn’t exactly sure how we would find such a thing, but Little Bear did some research and decided a poodle was the dog to get. I would have gone for a free critter from the local pound, but we found a kennel in Pennsylvania that had some purebreds for sale. “Dogs from a professional breeder are always better,” she assured me, though neither of us had ever bought a dog before.