Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  So when Owen, now splayed across the black leather chair, asks me, “Is George Bush angry at you?” I’m perversely delighted he knows what’s happening in the world and how it’s impacting our household. After interviews with media across the globe, I’m forced to answer him plainly, in a way that doesn’t induce concern. I say I’m just doing my job and the president is doing his—a simple, frank response that’s better than almost anything I’d said in all those interviews. He asks, “Are we okay?” I say we are. And he turns back to the movie. He believes Cornelia and me when we tell him things. Doesn’t poke around for subtext, agenda, or hidden meanings.

  So I don’t either, a moment later, as we watch that marching hyena scene. Did Owen ask me that question about Bush, knowing this scene was coming? Can’t really say. His prayer a few nights after the Iraq invasion helped shed any remaining doubts that he absolutely breathes in ambient tension, from inside the house or beyond it. He can’t process much of the spoken word that’s offered face-to-face—too stimulating in some way, his therapists say—but have Cornelia whisper something to me with the slightest emotional tone, and, from even two floors away, we’ll hear a polite but urgent: “Everything okay?” “Yes, Owie!” Cornelia will shout back. “Dad and I are just having a discussion.”

  On the screen, Simba—exiled after his father’s murder—is having a heart-to-heart with the meerkat, Timon, and the warthog, Pumbaa (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), who help him forget his troubles. Owen laughs, singing the African-themed song, “Hakuna matata…it’s our problem-free philosophy, hakuna matata.” I’m there, singing beside him. And when Owen dances before the screen, I do that, as well. He’s forgetting his troubles down here. I am, too, by entering the context where he lives—a river of symbols that flow in this half-light, far beneath the noisy surface-world of passing events and impressions.

  Drawing him to that surface, connecting him to the wider world of conventional knowledge may be futile. There’s a hook for Hamlet that spurs his interest. That’s a gift. Try asking him who invented the light bulb or why it rains or when the Civil War was fought (right century gets you credit) or what seven times three is, and you’ll often get a blank stare. Some of this type of general knowledge was beginning to stick in the last days at Lab, when he was prompted to know things of no particular interest to stay in the mix with new friends, but that—along with his skills in writing and math—have since slipped.

  I want to fix that, fix him, but lately Cornelia is saying, maybe we have to think more about just enjoying him for who he is and not trying to improve or repair him every minute of every day.

  It’s a difficult impulse for me to control. I want to fix everything, make it just so, make it right. But singing “Hakuna Matata” with him eases me and my corrective impulses. The movie comes around to the scene where Mufasa’s ghost comes to Simba, now maturing into young adulthood, and beckons him to fulfill his destiny. We watch it, silently, the ghost of a dead father hovering over a teenager, telling him who he is meant to be.

  “I had another dream about Big Walter,” Owen says quietly, referring to my father, who, of course, he’s never met. His eyes stay on the screen.

  There had already been a first dream, a few weeks earlier, which he’d told me about when we were flipping through some animation books in his room. He just blurted it out: “Big Walter visited me in my dream.” It took me a second to get my bearings. I don’t dream about my father and have often wondered why. I just asked Owen what my dad looked like in his dream; he said, like the picture of him (full-bodied, smiling, just before the cancer hit at forty-five) that hangs on the wall in the den. That was it, all he said.

  This time, I don’t respond, wanting to figure out some perfect thing to say that’ll encourage him to tell me more. So we just watch as Simba fulfills his destiny. His sidekicks—the protective hornbill, Zazu, the wise old baboon, Rafiki—make it possible. They usher him forward. Owen drinks it in, gets up, and stretches, requited, now, in this underground universe, his safe place of family and fable.

  “You said Big Walter was in another dream,” I mention casually. “So what happened?”

  Owen hadn’t sensed I was waiting to hear more. He just got involved in the movie.

  “Well, he was an old man this time with gray hair. He had lived his whole life. He was gentle and kind, and we talked and played. And he told me he loved me.”

  The crowd gathers on a splendid spring afternoon—April 17, 2004—in a modernist synagogue, all blond wood, soaring asymmetrical ceilings and skylights, built for sunny days.

  It will be one for Owen—got to be. Though we, like the two hundred or so well-wishers now settling into their seats, are not sure what to expect.

  Almost anything could happen. Which is why many kids like Owen don’t go through anything like the formal bar mitzvah ceremony, a ritual that rests on study and performance and meeting expectations of what a thirteen-year-old boy can—and now must—do to be accepted as an adult in a Jewish community.

  Being blissfully and sometimes disastrously self-directed, either Owen feels it or it doesn’t happen. He could easily decide to say a prayer, nod in affirmation, and walk off the stage.

  We’ve spent six months trying to ensure otherwise. It has been an almost frenzied struggle for the entire family, from the moment—the previous fall—when I asked Owen if he wanted to have a bar mitzvah like Walt’s, or something simpler. He said, “Like Walter did it. Now it’s my turn.”

  Between those two sentences stretched an uncharted landscape and a set of deep chasms. Bridges needed to be built. Strong ones. Bar mitzvahs actually do justice to that well-worn phrase “rite of passage.” They’re every bit as fraught as weddings, but with unpredictable adolescents, who generally need a lot of urging.

  For Owen, we naturally start with the movies. Were there movies with Jewish themes that could provide handles, anything to work with, to draw him in?

  We went with one indisputable favorite: An American Tail, a 1986 Universal animated film about mice from Russia, with thick accents, who come to America because “the streets are paved with cheese.” It’s Jews as mice, led by one of Owen’s most beloved characters, Fievel, the young mouse who is separated from his family and wanders through the gritty circus of 1890s New York. He has lots of sidekicks helping him fulfill his destiny, most of them among a set of Jews/mice that pretty much match—mouse for Jew—my ancestors who came through Ellis Island. After several viewings, this offered a strong opening hand: “The Jews, Owen, have always been history’s sidekicks.” That, he definitely got!

  As for the portion of the Torah that bar and bat mitzvah boys and girls read in mid-April, we got a lucky break: a passage from Leviticus where Moses receives the Ten Commandments. There, too, was a convenient animated movie: The Prince of Egypt, the 1998 DreamWorks rendition of the Exodus story. It was a movie he’d seen and didn’t like, because, he said, “There were no sidekicks for comic relief.” But we forced mandatory viewings—our version of Hebrew school—and eventually talked through the commandments and issues of right and wrong. He took to this, to a structure of dos and don’ts. This is common among spectrum kids. They like a rule, which, by its nature, narrows the many options of unpredictable behavior. We read through the English translations of the Ten Commandments and other rules listed in his passage from Leviticus. He nodded along. Some seemed to strike him, especially the ones that prohibit preying on the weak.

  But then he went about on his own business, writing up a speech—each bar mitzvah boy or girl has to give one, based on what they read in Hebrew from the Torah. He wrote down rules that he felt were important to him in colored markers on a few pages of his sketchbook. We told him to do what he does in prayers before dinner—now, just to write it down—and that we’d have to hear it at least a week before the big day. He’d been offering prayers at the dinner table a few nights a week for almost a year, ever since the Iraq prayer. We knew he had it in him, but only if we got out of his way and
he really felt like he was talking to God.

  But the central task—applying study skills that most kids pick up in school to learn to read from the Torah—was simply untenable. He was never going to read Hebrew. My skills peaked precisely thirty-four years prior at my bar mitzvah and had diminished steadily since. We needed a tutor; one with the patience of, well, a saint. What we found was a gray-haired, Justice Department lifer, a lawyer/prosecutor exuding a quiet, no-nonsense firmness that would’ve impressed Eliot Ness. Miriam, who went by Mim, was also the granddaughter of the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, our fast-growing slice of the faith that weaves traditional worship with a progressive sensibility, embraces mixed marriages (like ours), and advances its founding credo of making religion more relevant to daily life. As for a personal credo, Mim tapped an even deeper well: in the 1920s, her mother was the very first girl in the United States to have a bat mitzvah. Ever. This left her sixty-something daughter, who’d volunteered with special needs kids, with a powerful affinity for boosting someone many folks would not consider suitable for participation in such a rigorous, ancient ceremony; a purpose and patience that guided her, hour after hour, as she sat—reciting Hebrew and discussing it, in a way Owen could understand.

  All of this is pretext, a behind-the-curtain drama that is invisible to the expectant, mixed religion crowd now settled into the sanctuary of Adat Shalom in Bethesda: a gathering of Suskinds from New York and Florida, Kennedys from Connecticut, and a far-flung array of friends from Boston to Washington, many of Owen’s teachers and therapists, along with a few classmates and their parents. Just about everyone he knows in his life and a few folks from the congregation, who came around out of curiosity. This was the temple’s first-ever mincha service, what the ultra-orthodox, who pray all day, call their afternoon worship. For us, it was a way of meeting a basic requirement: that the bar mitzvah take place in an official capacity before the community into which a boy or girl is now to be accepted as an adult—without the prospect of things going haywire in front of the temple’s whole congregation.

  But the goal for all these elaborate plans is stark in its simplicity: for Owen to have his “turn,” as much like Walt—and every other Jewish kid—as is humanly possible.

  And this subtle pressure and hope, to make it happen for this kid, ripples through everyone involved in the emotive choreography of a Torah service. One after another, people get summoned to the stage, called the bima—with the Hebrew word “ya’ah’mode,” for “rise up”—to usher Owen forward through the service. The procession starts with Cornelia’s parents, who, together, read a Sanskrit prayer in English. Cornelia’s father, John, a man with a famously narrow emotive range, caps it with a surprise flourish. “Owen, may you always walk in sunshine. May you never want for more. May Irish angels rest their wings right beside your door,” he recites, his voice cracking with emotion on the last word.

  Cornelia squeezes my hand. “Oh, boy,” she whispers, “here we go.”

  Sitting beside her in the front row, I feel the pull of a current, a deep mysterious thing that runs on its own twisting path from the James and the Giant Peach play, where the kids lifted Owen on their shoulders, to a warm sensation of this whole room now here to lift him. As people are called forth for the many ritual roles—opening the ark where the Torah is held, removing it, carrying it around the room, removing the heavy velvet and silver ornamentation so it can be unscrolled, and then reading short passages, preceded and followed by short prayers—you can see them whispering to Owen, there in their midst—“This way, Owie” or “Walk beside me, buddy”—as they nudge him along, lifting him.

  Or maybe he’s lifting us. Lines are blurred. As Cornelia and I are called to the bima to present him with his prayer shawl, or tallit, we’re all smiles and a little unsteady. This moment, when the parents say something to the child, is a moment of oddly public intimacies, where you encourage and praise your child, express love, and reach for some religious verity…with a roomful of eavesdroppers. It’s spiritually voyeuristic—with the sorts of things you may never have said to your kids turned into oratory.

  Cornelia tells the story of Walt’s friend who once called Owen a “magic boy,” and she now tells him it’s true, “because you get so much joy out of life and see the wonderful things so many of us miss.” She’s speaking about his goodness, for sure, but also hinting about how that makes him vulnerable. “My prayer for you Owen,” she says, “is that you always see life with your heart and that you trust in all the people here today who hold you in their hearts with such love, and you continue to teach others with all the gifts God has given you.” To the trained ear, it’s a plea that this boy, with gentle gifts, will need help and protection and caring, up ahead, in a long life, which is, hereby, the obligation of everyone in this room—a verbal contract affirmed, Cornelia fervently hopes, with silent nods, row to row.

  Throughout her speech, Owen is looking all over—the skylights, the thick rug under his best shoes—and barely at Cornelia or me. It’s gaze aversion. It’s his way. I pull him gently toward us, holding both his hands, slipping a “Hey, buddy” in between her lines to compel his attention.

  And it’s no different for my turn, as I tell a crafted story about Owen to Owen, with witnesses, that I hope will subtly alter everyone’s view of him and his of himself. I’m trying to bind it—just as Cornelia has done—into a contract with everyone in the room to hedge against my own fears. I cite a nascent shift we’d seen in the preceding months where he decided to start calling us Mom and Dad, not Mommy and Daddy, and mentioned, once in passing, that he was giving some of his Disney movies “a rest” in favor of a growing passion for the live-action Batman films, where Tim Burton, he said, “turned Gotham into a dark, gloomy character.” We figured, with the bar mitzvah coming he was taking cues from Walt and, in some subconscious calculus, I wanted to lock that in, to encourage his reach for the socially acceptable and age-appropriate. This was both for Owen and for everyone in the room who might help along this adolescent maturation. So, after framing this little story as part of “becoming a man,” I recite Owen’s own words from a month before back to him: “Owen, you told me ‘It’s time for me to leave the Disney villains behind and move past little kid things. That it’s time for Batman, for a little darkness and complexity.’” Of course, this draws laughs.

  And even bigger ones, when Owen responds—“And SpongeBob!”—basically killing the whole gambit.

  “But, Owen, some darkness and complexity?”

  “And SpongeBob!” he exclaims again (more laughs), and—leaving it there—I push to close it with a grasp at something spiritual, talking about his special quality of talking to God, of feeling his presence. “And as you grow and explore and reach for the stars, keep talking to God. And, while you’re at it, tell him thanks from us, for bringing you into our lives.”

  Then we’re done speaking on his behalf. Cornelia says love him the way he is, or else; I say help him change, so he can make his own way in an unforgiving world—a pair of political/emotional statements of parent to child, read from typed pages shaking lightly in our hands.

  We step down, as he puts the prayer shawl over his shoulders and steps to the podium; the Torah, unscrolled, awaits. This we watch from our seats—nothing we can do now; just him up there, with the imperious Mim, his tutor, on one side, and Rachel Hersh—the temple’s Judy Collins-like cantor leading the service on the other.

  But he seems calm and starts looking with intent curiosity at the sea of eyes. He’s never had so many people look at him. He appears free of fear and the performance anxiety that usually accompanies knowing what people think and caring so deeply about it. And he’s got an asset here: the memory that allowed him to store and encode a few dozen hours of Disney films, though—at the start—he couldn’t understand the English any better than he now doesn’t understand Hebrew. He doesn’t memorize anything he doesn’t care about. But Mim whispers the first word of his Torah portion, and it’s clear
he cares, chanting line after line of Hebrew, looking out at the crowd, Mim by his side, silently reading each word in the old scroll—something she often does in services, as the no-nonsense guardian of the sacred book—her lips moving gently. After a few minutes, he’s finished with this long and startling recitation. She nods. Perfect. And after he recites the closing prayer, perfect again, she smiles and holds out her hand. He palms it, a gentle high five, and she gets out the word “ya’ah’mode” trying to call forward those to now redress the Torah—before her voice falters and sudden tears blind her. Seeing this woman cry kills me, and Cornelia, too, in some echo, I suppose, of a thousand years of girls who were told they didn’t belong up here, either. And Mim—genuinely surprised, like someone caught in a spring shower—wipes her eyes and slips off the bima.

  And all this was before he got to the English.

  We knew what was coming—we’d heard the speech. It was like a four-paragraph-long grace before dinner, exercising this invisible prayer muscle of his. It makes no sense, really. Ask him to write about what he’s read in a third-grade textbook or heard a teacher say, repeatedly, and you get two thin sentences, with simple verbs and misspellings. Ask him to dig deep inside for something to say to God, in front of all the people he knows, and it flows like music.

  And we know everyone in the room is about to witness this contradiction—just as we know the way many of them look at the “left behind” as Owen would say. The way we used to.

  He says that his Torah portion contains many commandments about ethics, “about right and wrong,” including “one of the most important rules in this chapter: that you should not put a stumbling block in front of a blind person. This means you should never trick someone or be unkind to them. A blind person has a handicap and God tells us that we should never take advantage of another person’s weakness.”