Raising Cubby (11 page)

I had always been a storyteller, even when I didn’t have an audience. As a tyke in the sandbox, I constructed elaborate fantasies around blocks and toy trucks. I imagined whole cities with sophisticated machines to run them. All that was missing were people to tell my stories to. Sometimes other kids would join me long enough to enter my worlds; other times when they departed, adults would stay and listen to my tales. They were my first audiences.

When I turned eight, my mother got me a little brother, whom I called Varmint. Varmint followed me everywhere and paid close attention to anything I said or did. He loved my stories, which presented me with daily challenges as I struggled to dream up a never-ending variety of fresh material.

I realized Cubby was much like Varmint; if I thought it up, and it made sense, he would listen and like it. And by then I had twenty-some additional years of life experience. That was a lot of story material.

Cubby’s favorite bedtime beastie was Gorko, a flying lizard. Gorko had been born far away, in Flying Lizard Land, which is
below and to the right of Australia on certain secret maps of the world. By the time I first told Cubby about him, Gorko was eight years old and had already mastered solo flight and medium-strength fire breathing.

Gorko was my own invention, but I knew how much Cubby liked his routines, so I wove all his childhood favorites into Gorko’s stories, distorting them mightily as I went. I had Gorko leading a lizard army into Bear Country and rounding up the Berenstain Bears for the Lizard City Zoo. On the way there, they passed Road Kill Phil and the Cat in the Hat, who was destitute and homeless. Gorko’s friends the Cargo Lizards went to the Isle of Sodor, where they picked up Thomas the Tank Engine and carried him south to the Lizard Country Railway. Cubby loved it when I put all his favorite characters together, an approach that had the advantage of reducing the number of creatures, places, and things I had to conjure out of thin air.

Like many good fables, the story of Gorko was inspired by life—in this case, the lives of Zeke and Pete, the fire-breathing lizards that lived next door to Cubby’s GrandMargaret in Shelburne Falls. Everyone in town knew them. We didn’t actually catch sight of them much, of course, because fire lizards are very shy and because they lived in the basement. But we knew they were down there, and it’s comforting to know there’s a quarter-ton lizard next door if you need it.

Zeke and Pete worked for George the glassblower, who had a shop down the street from my mother. Townspeople said George walked his lizards to work every morning before dawn and took them home after dark. They worked long hours, those lizards, but they had fun and it kept them busy and away from bullies who might otherwise have tormented them.

Bullies were always a problem for lizards like Zeke and Pete. Anyone who’s different attracts bullies at some point growing up, and lizards are
very
different, so they can end up being bully magnets,
especially in unenlightened hill towns. Up there, mean kids would throw rocks at them and even jab them with sharp sticks.

Like the rest of their kind, Zeke and Pete were placid, tolerant creatures, but they had their limits. And when they got mad … watch out! An angry lizard could turn a mean kid into a pile of cinders in a matter of seconds. A hundred years ago, a lizard might have gotten away with defending itself, but modern lizards didn’t stand a chance. Sometimes the lizards ended up in jail; other times they got run out of town on a rail. That’s how Zeke and Pete had ended up in Shelburne Falls. They’d been run out of Wappingers Falls, New York, after a scuffle that ended with two toasted lowlifes and one burned police car.

George had taken them in, befriended them, and given them a warm place to sleep next to his furnace. That was very unusual, because most glassblowers grow up alongside their lizards. Very few bond as grown-ups. Zeke and Pete knew that, and repaid George’s kindness with faithful service in his shop. Sometimes Cubby and I would go to the art galleries in nearby Northampton, and we’d speculate as to which lizard blew the fire for particular pieces of glass sculpture. Folks said Zeke had the stronger fire, so we figured he blew the biggest ones, whereas Pete was renowned for his small, precise flames and beautiful detail work.

Cubby loved to watch glassblowers at work. He was captivated by the idea that glass could be heated red hot and pulled and twisted into strange shapes. Before seeing a glassblower at work, he had assumed glass was an immutable solid, like rock, unless you dropped it and it shattered. Seeing it flow like taffy was a shock. But he knew ice melted, so he was able to grasp the idea that glass melted too. You just needed a lot more heat. And that was what hit us as soon as we entered the glassblower’s shop: heat from the lizards. Even if you couldn’t see them, you couldn’t help but feel the heat pouring out of their mouths as they blew that glass.

Whenever we opened the door to the glass shop the little bells
would tinkle, and if we were quick, we’d see Zeke and Pete’s tails swish as they slithered out of sight behind the counter. Some people said it was unfair, the way they had to hide on the floor, but I thought it was for the best. After all they’d been through, it was no wonder they were shy. George always said they were happier keeping to themselves.

Anyway, as long as you stayed by the door, you could glimpse the fire lizards at work, and it was truly a marvel to see. From that vantage point, we watched George shape bowls, vases, and other glassware as Zeke and Pete blew jets of blue fire up through holes in the stone benches. George always worked barefoot, using his toes to press his lizards’ tails to signal the precise amount and temperature of fire he needed. Watching the three of them, it was as if they were telepathic. It was an ancient trade, like fortune-telling or the Gypsy arts.

We always knew Zeke and Pete as big, gentle, slow-moving creatures. As I told Cubby, it takes a massive reptile to blow that much fire. Not surprisingly, they ate a lot of food. George always had a pile of meat in his shop, and Zeke and Pete were known far and wide for the way they cooked their own dinners. Some say that’s where our caveman ancestors got the idea.

Given his attachment to Zeke and Pete, it didn’t surprise me that Cubby wanted to know all about Gorko. He asked how flying lizards differed from fire lizards and whether fire-breathing lizards were the same as dragons. He even wondered why Gorko didn’t live in Shelburne Falls too, since it seemed to be a lizard-friendly town.

I did my best to answer his questions. I explained that ancient people called flying lizards that blew fire dragons, and that many books had been written about the age-old struggle between dragons and humans. Gorko, being a young, modern lizard, was a lot mellower than the dragons of old, I told Cubby. He watched TV, played games, and seldom got into fights. Also, he got along with humans. There was a time, long ago, when lizards ruled the world.
All that had changed, I told Cubby, thanks to helicopter gunships and radar-guided missiles. Now humans were in charge of most worlds while the great lizards were relegated to Flying Lizard Land. The lizards that ventured out into human space were the ones that could get along with people without getting arrested or shot down by fighter jets.

They surely had their fun, playing pranks, doing stunts, and being big kids. They did all the things I’d have done if I had wings and a tail. Cubby loved it all, and when bedtime came, he couldn’t wait to hear more.

Those were the creatures that Cubby went to sleep with every night.

When I was growing up, the adults around me were quick to tell me I’d never amount to anything. As the years passed, and I became commercially successful, people stopped taunting me with words like that. By the time Cubby came along, people were actually telling Little Bear and me what good parents we would be, something that struck me as pretty peculiar, given our family backgrounds.

Neither of us had any idea what to do with a kid. Yet there we were, raising Cubby. We’d read a few books, and visited some zoos and jails, but we remained totally lacking in functional role models. Both our dads had been nasty, mean drunks when we were little. Now that we were all older, their dispositions had mellowed, but it was too late. We were adults; our chance to grow up with wise and wonderful parents had passed. However, Cubby’s arrival gave all of us a second chance. To my amazement, our dads actually added real wisdom to the pool of knowledge we deployed in pursuit of that enlightened goal of Perfect Parenthood.

I had never imagined my father as a baby-centric sort of guy. Of course, until Cubby came along, I’d never seen him with a little
kid either. Whenever I was present, my father was very thoughtful and reserved, not the sort of person you’d associate with babble and drool. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I am exactly the same way.

My dad taught philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. He took his work very seriously. Actually, he took everything seriously. They voted him department head in the 1980s, and by the time Cubby was born, he had turned UMass Philosophy into one of the top-ranked departments in the country. My dad could discuss Heidegger or Kant all day, but talk of Dr. Seuss or Thomas the Tank Engine brought him to a complete and sudden halt. He’d say, “Yes, Jack, that’s nice,” and wiggle Cubby’s baby paws with one of his own giant fingers. Beyond that maneuver, I didn’t think he had any idea what else to do with a baby.

I was wrong.

As soon as Cubby was able to stand on his own, Little Bear began to alternate dropping him off with my mother or my father while she went to school. My father and his wife, Judy, only worked in the office part time by then, and they were surprisingly enthusiastic about watching a tyke. My father even put together a basket of toys that he pulled out whenever Cubby came calling. I don’t know where he got the stuff; some of it was older than me! He had a real Lionel train and a big green sack of Lincoln Logs, just for Cubby. Seeing them brought back memories of my own Lincoln Logs and the way they tasted as I chewed them in my sandbox.

My father seemed to share my own philosophy when selecting toys for Cubby. Both of us bought him things we’d loved when we were little. To us, time-tested wood and metal toys were infinitely superior to the modern plastic stuff they advertised on TV.

Little Bear’s father was in many ways the opposite of my own. He paved driveways, and people called him the Old Boy, or Easy Ed. Friends from the paving industry, where smoking-hot asphalt is laid down four inches thick, had their own name for him: Half
Inch. My father was distinguished and very well spoken. The Old Boy was a genial thug: three feet wide, five feet tall, with a firm handshake and a ready laugh. My father had stopped drinking years ago, but the Old Boy still loved his whiskey.

The Old Boy and his second wife, Alice, loved to feed the wildlife, and there was plenty of it where they lived. He’d built a house at the base of Mount Norwottock—a few miles from our home—with nothing but woods for miles behind him. Black bear, raccoons, squirrels, foxes, deer, and just about every other creature that lived in those parts came calling on the back patio, all clamoring for treats. Visiting their house was sort of like being in a zoo at feeding time, except that there were no cages and we were in the way.

The Old Boy and Alice presided over their wild kingdom, doling out meat to the carnivores and corncobs and table scraps to the plant eaters. It was a remarkable thing to see. Predators and prey would be side by side on the patio, eating the Old Boy’s food. Foxes and turkeys might have been sworn enemies in the forest, but they got along fine at his place. I never saw a fight.

Cubby’s grandpa also liked to get the family together for picnic dinners, thinking the same model of harmony through food could be achieved with humans. After attending a few of those dinners, I became a little leery of them. So did Little Bear. After all, anytime you mix twenty people, a lot of liquor, and hungry wild animals there is good potential for trouble. There were moments when it really wasn’t clear which of us were the eaters and which were the food. One night I was sitting peaceably at the picnic table when a raccoon walked right up into my lap and took a piece of meat off my plate. When I say raccoon, I’m not talking about some soft, cuddly woodland creature. This was a burly thirty pounder with teeth an inch long and claws to match. Not the sort of thing you want to fight over a scrap of steak, especially when it’s already in its mouth. The Old Boy laughed as that fat old coon wandered into the woods with my dinner. I got a new steak off the grill, where the Old Boy stood
guard with a big set of tongs. He was the undisputed Duke of the Patio. No beast dared to take food from him.

I realized at that moment that what seemed friendly might not be, and it was possible the animals were all putting on an act just to get food. I know some of the people were that way, though it was the liquor that lured them, not corn on the cob.

Cubby had an even harder time. Not only did he have to watch for aggressive wildlife, he had to keep an eye out for pets, too. The Old Boy had two dogs, Bailey and Beaver, that were just about his size. They were friendly as could be, but if he walked onto the patio with a donut they wouldn’t think twice about taking it for themselves. They’d chase him, knock him down, eat his chocolate cream donut, and then lick him good. He was left on his bottom, empty-handed, with sugary chocolate slobber all over his face as two laughing dogs divvied up his dessert.