by Ron Suskind
Whenever I approach with a serious look on my face, he always says, “Is everything okay?!”
I always say, “Everything’s fine!” with a little punctuation for emphasis. It gives me a glimpse into how much anxiety he wrestles with, but I hate him thinking that something’s always wrong.
This time I don’t punctuate. I want him to sense that yes, everything’s fine, but there’s something important to discuss.
Before I hung up with Don, we talked about schedules. Owen’s off to college in September, which is also when my book on Obama comes out. Don’s soon to vanish into his next project, a stop-action animated film he’s doing with Tim Burton called, Frankenweenie. If he’s going to dig up some development money, and maybe find a screenwriter to assist us, this is the time. He wondered if I had any more specifics on what happens to Owen’s sidekicks in their journey.
I get right to it. “Owen, Don Hahn’s is asking for a few more details about the plot, you know, what happens in the forest with the boy and his gang of sidekicks.”
He’s on one side of the kitchen island, and I’m on the other.
“I’m working on it.”
I figured he’d say that, so for the past few days I’ve been thinking about how I’d respond. All his leaps forward he’s managed alone—from the first sketchbook and its inscriptions to the rewriting of the scripts to the story of the magic stone. The one exception was when Walt pressed him after the Halloween rescue—that’s where he first said it, about the sidekicks searching for a hero. But Walt has a channel into Owen’s deepest places, the place where his desire to be like his brother, surprisingly strong, resides.
Or maybe it’s not so surprising. Belly up to the bar, I’m standing on the fault line where Cornelia and I stood much of our lives. On the same versus different conundrum: wondering how he’s like other kids and how he’s not. And no teenager wants to be pushed into something by a father. But then again, most teens wouldn’t need a parent to draw this line for them: between their stated dreams and maybe their one and only shot.
“Owen, if you have something in there that you’ve been thinking through, this is the time.” Then, I figure, what the hell. “Listen, if you want me to help, try out ideas on me. You know, I’m pretty good with stories.”
He nods. Looks down.
“No, Dad, I know. You’re the story guy. But I’m okay.”
An hour later he seeks me out. He’d gone up to his room and now he’s back—again in the kitchen—with a drawing he’s made. He hands it silently to me.
It’s from a famous sequence, where the newly released Genie—explaining his powers to a startled Aladdin in the Cave of Wonders—makes a run of transformations from William F. Buckley to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jack Nicholson, proving that Robin Williams was meant to be an animated character. In the midst of them, to show he’s the original Genie—and Aladdin should “accept no imitations!”—a blue puppet genie, a ventriloquist’s dummy, appears on the Genie’s lap and is then discarded.
Owen has drawn a precise rendering of the Genie, with the puppet genie on his lap.
I look down at the picture.
“I can be the Genie,” he says, softly. “Not the puppet genie.”
Same, not different. This is Owen’s version of adolescent rebellion. Quite pointed, actually.
“Okay buddy. Got it.”
The moment has arrived.
As a new student, Owen will need to attend the summer program at Riverview School, where we’ll drive him right after the Fourth of July from our Vermont lake house. That means, on June 26, he’ll be leaving his home in Washington for college.
Ask him to find which mathematical function applies to a straightforward word problem, and you’re liable to get a blank stare. But add one key element—the date June 26—and he reverse engineers an equation matching the number of available viewing days with the number of videos he simply must see one last time in the beloved cave to prepare for, well, his future.
Of course. How else could it end, except with a twenty-four-day movie marathon?
Every day, there’s a movie. All the Disney favorites and a few—like An American Tale Fievel Goes West or Quest for Camelot—that have nudged their way into the pantheon. Most times he wants company.
Cornelia and I are more than glad to oblige. It doesn’t take more than a few viewings to feel a strange grip envelop us all.
We might as well be watching home movies.
When a child leaves for college, parents are usually hit hard on drop-off day. When we dropped Walt off at his dorm at Penn State, we got there a little early and left him in what was all but an empty dorm. We hugged him and told him what he already knew—that we loved him and were proud of him. Cornelia wept as she embraced him, now reaching way up.
He’s a tough kid at this point—prides himself on it. He smiled his, “got this covered” smile. But the image of his standing alone in the dorm hit Cornelia hard once we began the drive home. “He was forced to grow up so fast, always ready to be on his own, and there he was.”
All I could say is that it’s made him strong; cold comfort to Cornelia, to say the least.
For Owen, we watch his movies with him. This has really been a big part of our life with him, since we sat on the bed in Georgetown and wondered if the flicker in his eye, as one scene passed to the next, meant that our son was in there somewhere.
In this basement, we got to meet our son, bit by bit. And, as a family, we danced and sang and took on the life of his characters, until they began to take on our lives and join us in the noisy, sunlit world above.
There were years when Cornelia and I resented Disney, couldn’t bear another viewing of Peter Pan or Dumbo. But, over time, that’s mostly changed. We love the movies because we love our son, and the movies are a part of him.
The day we watch The Lion King, well along in the movie marathon, he jumps from his chair and stands before the screen for the part he’s been waiting for—when the teenaged Simba tells Rafiki how difficult it is to change.
“Change is hard,” Rafiki responds. “But it is good.”
Soon, Rafiki tells him to learn from his past, as a guide to his future, and sets him off to fulfill his destiny. The baboon raises his arms in triumph—“go, go”—and Owen does to. And, as he turns, we can hear him whisper, “Thank-you.”
It’s not to us.
The Lion King is in the final quartet. He seems to have scheduled viewings in reverse order of his early discovery. Which means next is Aladdin and then Beauty and the Beast. For that one, Cornelia excuses herself, beckoned by an enormous checklist to prepare for Owen’s departure.
As Beauty and the Beast ends, he’s up, singing the finale. And I’m up with him. He waits, as always, until the credits have run—reading all the names like he’s checking on the whereabouts of old friends—before he flips it off.
I stop him at the base of the stairs.
“Owen, can you help me understand something. You’ve been watching this movie nonstop since you’re three.…”
“Actually, I’ve been watching it nonstop since I was one.”
I’m caught up short about how we see him differently before the autism hit and after. He doesn’t. It was him before. It’s him after. I smile, happy to stand corrected.
“No, you’re right. Since you’re one. So, help me understand what you see when you watch this movie. What’s it look like through your eyes.”
I can instantly see that a gift is coming. Maybe it’s the time and place, or maybe something that has come to fullness in him, as he prepares to go. But his voice goes soft, letting down a register.
“The movie doesn’t change. That is what I love about it. But I change. And each time, it looks different to me. It was scary when I was small. And then I understood that it was about finding beauty, even in places where it’s hard to find. But now I realize it’s about something else. A bigger thing. It’s about finding beauty in yourself, because only then will you really be able t
o really see it in others, and everywhere.”
He rolls his shoulders and head once, resettling himself around having given voice and shape to this feeling.
“And now I can see beauty everywhere.”
Finally, he finishes. The Little Mermaid was the first movie for him—the first one that became a lifeboat when he so needed it.
Retracing his steps, it comes last.
And he’s ardent about both of us watching it with him. We’ll be leaving the very next morning. Checklists are checked. A new array of items—college stuff—is packed into suitcases.
We’re on the sofa, he’s on the black leather chair. The room gets quiet when Ariel loses her voice. I’m about to say something. What he said about Beauty and the Beast last night is all I can think about—I want more—but Cornelia stops me with a squeeze of my hand. “Let him watch,” she whispers.
He does. And we do. More quietly than usual. Right until the end, where King Triton looks upon to the forlorn Ariel—safe finally, as is her love, Eric, but still a mermaid—as he considers whether to turn her into a human:
TRITON: SHE REALLY DOES LOVE HIM, DOESN’T SHE, SEBASTIAN?
SEBASTIAN: WELL, IT’S LIKE I ALWAYS SAY, YOUR MAJESTY. CHILDREN GOT TO BE FREE TO LEAD THEIR OWN LIVES.
TRITON: YOU ALWAYS SAY THAT? THEN I GUESS THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM LEFT.
SEBASTIAN: AND WHAT IS THAT, YOUR MAJESTY?
TRIGHTON: HOW MUCH I’M GOING TO MISS HER.
Owen hits PAUSE and turns his head toward us, his face pensive.
“Are we okay?” he asks.
We both tell him we are. “We’re going to miss you terribly, Owen,” Cornelia says. “But that’s the way it should be. It’s a good thing. It’s because we love you so much that we’ll miss you so much.”
He nods, requited, and rolls the credits.
Owen is opening the microwave in the galley kitchen when we arrive.
“Should I put in the Orville’s,” he calls to the dorm counselor out in the suite—gets the A-OK—and then emerges to help us lay out cups, juice, and M&M’s on a table in the TV lounge. The students trickle in.
It’s the Sunday night meeting of Disney Club in mid-April 2012. Owen decided to start the club not long after he arrived at Riverview eight months ago. It’s been a fine first year thus far in the college program: he’s getting a mix of academic and social challenges, has made one good friend, and is building independence.
Starting Disney Club has been a highlight—he’s never been in a club, never mind the president of one. About a dozen students come to Owen’s dorm each week, settle in to eat popcorn, chat a bit, and watch their favorites. They don’t do much. A few times across the months he described club meetings to us and we tried to suggest activities over the phone. Then a few weeks ago, he asked if we could come out as Disney Club’s parent advisers.
We always knew there were other autistic spectrum kids who focused intently on Disney—we’d met several, after all, over the years. But by starting this club, Owen has drawn together a roomful of them.
Cornelia and I arrive well armed to meet this group. We bring refreshments. We stopped at the Disney Store to pick up a trivia game with questions to help us facilitate discussion. Of course, we’ve been preparing for this much of our lives.
Tonight’s selection is Dumbo—a fertile tale of self-recognition and emergence. With Cornelia feeding me questions, I move right into familiar terrain. Dumbo is ridiculed because he’s different.
“Ever happen to anyone, here?” I ask the kids, spread across couches and chairs in the dorm lounge. The room gets quiet.
The students begin to discuss when they’ve been ridiculed and bullied. Everyone has a story. It’s clear some have never spoken about this before.
“I’ve been bullied, too,” Owen says, joining in. A girl named Tess says that when it happened to her, “it made me want so much to be normal.”
It becomes immediately clear that these students have rarely, if ever, had their passion for Disney treated as something serious and meaningful. There’re so many avenues to walk with Dumbo. After they watch a bit of the movie, we freeze it and talk about how the thing that makes the little elephant a pariah, his huge ears, ultimately allows him to soar.
I ask each of them about their “hidden ears,” the thing “that makes them different—maybe even an outcast—that they’ve discovered is a great strength.”
One girl talks about how her gentle nature, something that leaves her vulnerable, is a great strength in how she handles rescue dogs. Another mentions, “my brain, because it can take me on adventures of imagination.”
A boy named Josh, speaking in a very routinized way, with speech patterns that closely match the Rain Man characterization, asks me a question: the date of my birthday. I tell him—November 20, 1959. His eyes flicker. “That was a Friday.” Does the same for Cornelia, a Monday. What are his hidden ears? “I can do the birthdays!”
When I ask the group which character they most identify with, Josh, now enlivened, says Pinocchio and talks about being “born with wooden eyes.” He goes on to articulate his choice more clearly: “I feel like a wooden boy, and I’ve always dreamed of feeling what real boys feel.”
A dorm counselor who told me ahead of time that Josh has disciplinary issues and an unreachable emotional core, compliments him—“that was beautiful, Josh,” she says—and looks at me with astonishment. I shrug. He’d already bonded in a soul-searching way with his character. I just asked him which one.
Owen, handling the remote, fast-forwards to the key scenes. When Dumbo lets go of the magic feather he’s been told he needs to fly, Molly—a girl with a pad of intricate Disney drawings on her lap, just like Owen—says that we all need that feather “sometimes because we don’t have confidence in ourselves.” Other kids echo that.
It’s that way for an hour. Like a broken dam. Students—many of whom have very modest expressive speech—summon subtle and deeply moving truths.
When I ask, “What villain do you identify with when you’re having your worst day?” we even learn something new about Owen.
“Hades,” he says, softly. Hades from Hercules? Cornelia and I exchange perplexed glances, as I ask him why.
“Because Hades is always disappointed he’s not invited to any parties and celebrations. And he wants revenge on Zeus, who banished him from Mount Olympus,” Owen notes. Of course, Hades, Zeus’s brother, lived in paradise until he was cast down to an underworld he came to rule. “Is Zeus super popular?” I ask.
He nods, “Yes. Hades is not popular!”
After the meeting, we press the dorm counselors looking on—several are now observing—and they tell us Owen’s been more
isolated and alone than we’d imagined, still at a loss for friends and feeling it acutely. In fact, the dorm counselors, who see these students every day and night, are perplexed. “Many of these kids barely talk,” one says. “And never like this.”
Cornelia and I are conflicted. Part of us is ecstatic about what we found at Disney Club. Part of us feels we shouldn’t have come. This is the long-awaited year of transition—for all of us. A time of endings and beginnings. And everything had been going according to carefully laid intentions.
We had an empty nest in Washington—just two parents on the third floor—and it felt just right. We checked in with Owen, regularly, of course. We visited Cape Cod for Parents Weekend last fall. He came home for Thanksgiving, like other college kids. Cornelia began to think about projects—a book she’s long been wanting to write, a class to take to become a florist, helping more with a clinic in Haiti run by a friend.
I was offered a six-month appointment at Harvard’s Kennedy School. We rented an apartment in Harvard Square in January 2012, to start the semester not far from where Walt was born. All our old friends were waiting for us. There and back again. It felt like a fresh start.
It was comforting to be just an hour away from Owen on the Cape, and convenient to get to Rivervie
w for things like the school’s Transition Weekend in late February.
It was sort of like Parents Weekend for the second semester, but jammed with programs about where students go after they leave the school.
A few minutes into the first session, we realized why there were two hundred Riverview parents sitting pensively, even grimly, in a hotel ballroom in Hyannis, including many, like us, still years away from a child’s graduation.
It’s clear many of us had misused the term college. It’s a word loaded with connotations of earned rewards and bright futures, the start of a young person’s journey away from parents and into the wider world. Everyone in the ballroom recognized we were all on a different path, but that didn’t change the way you felt when you’d tell someone that your kid—that’s right, that’s the one—is in college in Massachusetts. It felt good that you’d managed to give them the same experience that other kids had, the big right-of-passage through college. And what after that? Well, we’ll figure that out when it’s time.
At a long raised table in the banquet hall, a panel of parents of Riverview alumni, brought it all into stark relief for us. They told us that the years at this school are over before you know it, and then described how their kids, between their early twenties and mid-thirties, were faring. The parents of a couple that had met at Riverview, and had each just turned thirty, told us about sterilizing them both (because who would raise their children if they had them) and how their “wedding” was a small religious ceremony, because they’d lose federal disability benefits if they were legally married.
Others talked about their kids being in group houses, sometimes lonely and full of yearning, and many of them unemployable. The message, nonetheless, was “moving back home is not good for them or for you,” as one parent said, but be prepared to be involved in their lives forever, even if it may not be the lives you want or they want.
Another parent talked of how isolated the kids can be when they leave Riverview, and how this was a short oasis in a community of the like-minded before embarking on a long journey of the disabled adult, where services reaching the growing wave of autistic folk dry up. Someone raised the question of what happens in old age, when we die.