Raising Cubby (21 page)

“What color is the Deere? Is it green? And if Deere and Caterpillar are named after animals, what is Komatsu named after?” They were good questions, deserving of answers, but the goal was getting him to sleep, not expanding his knowledge of machines.

He would also get distracted by details. When I told him that a Caterpillar with a ripper was going by, he asked what it was. Kids with less curiosity might have let the ripper slide by undetected. Not Cubby. I was forever explaining.

“A ripper is a claw that sticks into the dirt behind the bulldozer. It tears a line in the soil that makes it easier for the next bulldozer in line to dig in. That’s why they call it a ripper. It rips the ground. You can do the same thing in your sandbox with your finger behind a toy bulldozer.”

My explanation proved to be a mistake, because Cubby suddenly became fully awake and eager to verify what I had just said. Eventually we reached a balance, where the bulldozer stream was monotonous enough for him to go to sleep but varied enough to keep me awake. We’d count one Caterpillar after another, with the occasional
Komatsu thrown in for variety. I’d lean against the headboard, patiently listening as those bulldozers crawled by. “Pet me,” Cubby would say, and I’d gently stroke the top of his head as we lay there. Sometimes I fell asleep too, which was fine, until I fell off the corner of his little kid bed. If he stayed asleep, that was my signal to head to my room. If he woke up, we started the petting and the bulldozers all over again.

I don’t know how it happened, but somehow, when Cubby was ten, he got wind of an event called the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. He was fascinated by the televised images of beasts running wild in the streets alongside strangely dressed humans. We had never lived among livestock, and Cubby had no prior experience as a bull runner, so I could not understand what he saw in either the beasts or the event. But he was stubborn, and his enthusiasm grew in inverse proportion to mine.

“Can we go can we go can we go?” He bounced in time to the words, as if he were on one of those amusement park kangaroos that sit on big springs. Kids have no concept of distance. He begged for a five-thousand-mile trip to Spain just like he’d beg for a trip downtown for ice cream. Cubby had learned early on that the persistent bird gets the worm and the persistent kid gets the treat. I usually gave in, though there was often a verbal tussle.

I might tell him the persistent kid gets chained up in the basement, or eaten for dinner, but he no longer believed in my threats, and he went with the odds in hopes of getting whatever he wanted at that moment. Even a trip to Europe.

Some dads would have balked at the idea of crossing the Atlantic to mix children and large animals in an uncontrolled environment. Not me. I am just fine among beasts. Bull running actually sounded kind of cool. The only part I had a problem with was the distance and the cost. Luckily, I had an answer.

“We don’t need to go all the way to Spain. We have a local event, a strolling of cows, right here in Vermont.” If Cubby picked up the distinction between cows and bulls, he didn’t let on. “Not only that,” I continued, “the cows in Vermont are kid cows, heifers, so they are a lot closer to your size.” And the best part was that Vermont’s run happens a month earlier than the one in Spain. That meant the stroll was coming up the very next weekend. I promised Cubby we’d go. Every time he thought of it, I repeated my promise. Ten or twenty times, some days.

When the fateful Sunday morning dawned, we got up bright and early and piled into the car. Brattleboro is about an hour north, and Cubby chattered excitedly about cows all the way. When he was locked onto something, it did not do much good to introduce alternate conversational subjects. He didn’t hear them.

“Dad! The average speed of a bull run is fifteen miles an hour. How fast is that? Can we run fifteen miles an hour?” I wondered where he found the average speed of a bull run and whether it was right. More often than not, Cubby did prove to be correct about things like that. For a kid who didn’t read until third grade, he had turned out to be a remarkably good researcher.

There was no traffic behind us, so I slowed the car from sixty to fifteen miles an hour. It felt like we had stopped as I turned to Cubby. “This is fifteen miles an hour.” Cubby was sure he could run considerably faster, but I sensed a bit of apprehension as we got closer. Cubby had read about people getting trampled or gored, and I’m sure he did not want his name added to that list. “It won’t matter, Cubby, because this particular event is a stroll, not a run. That means they go slower. We won’t be in any danger.”

As vivid as my descriptions had been, Cubby still wasn’t absolutely sure if he believed in the Brattleboro Cow Stroll. He knew the one in Spain was real, but he wasn’t so sure about the one in Vermont. Maybe the whole thing was a giant deception of mine. When we got off at the exit, he knew immediately something was up. The road was totally jammed. We’d never seen anything like it on any previous visit to Brattleboro. Parked cars lined both sides of the street, with late arrivals disgorging adults and kids, who flowed together into an amorphous mass, headed for town. It was clear that cow strolling—or whatever we were headed for—drew a big crowd. We had a mile to walk, and Cubby talked bulls every step of the way.

His excitement increased when we passed signs announcing the stroll, and he knew for sure it was real. “Maybe they have iguanas and weasels, too,” I suggested, but he wasn’t losing sight of the cows. He continued to chatter as we made our way along.

By the time we reached Main Street, I knew where bull runs were held, how many people had died in them, how the bulls were herded, the number of bulls in a run, and a thousand other bits of bull trivia. Cubby’s ability to gather facts about topics of interest was always impressive. I remembered being that way myself. Actually, to a large extent, I am still that way now. I just mask my enthusiasm a little bit as an adult, because not everyone is as keenly interested in the finer details of life as me. I’ve always gotten a certain satisfaction from knowing I can recognize all the farm tractors in the parade and explain the features of every single one. That is the joy of a true machine aficionado; something less mechanical people can never understand.

Surprisingly, Cubby had not collected any trivia about this event in Brattleboro, though his mind was filled to excess about bull runs in general. I was pleased to present him something new, because things I knew and he didn’t made it hard for him to dismiss me as a total idiot. He was already becoming certain that I was the fool, and
he the only one with any worthwhile knowledge. “All kids get that way,” my friends told me, but the words did not make his incipient teenage superiority any less aggravating.

Martial music began as we started down the little hill into town. “Hurry,” Cubby said. “They’re about to start.” We picked up the pace and soon a marching band came into view. “This is like the St. Patrick’s Day parade,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he answered. “This is a bull run.”

At that point, the first of the bulls came into view. They were huge creatures, far bigger than a fat guy on a Harley, with little gold balls on the tips of their horns. They were led by stern-looking farmers who didn’t look left or right, only straight ahead, as they led their bulls at the head of the procession. They looked like the kind of farmers you read about in Stephen King novels, doing unspeakable things in small-town granges. I could imagine them with those same stern expressions, holding torches and advancing on some poor victim on a moonless Maine night.

Behind them we saw young farmers, some Cubby’s age, leading smaller versions of the beasts past us. They smiled and waved, a reassuring contrast to their somber-looking elders. “They’re not running at all. This is a cow parade!” Of course, I had already told him that this was a stroll, not a run, but my words didn’t count. In any case, I didn’t want to disappoint Cubby. “Maybe they will take off in a minute. Perhaps someone will jab a cow with a stick, and he will be off like a rocket, trampling spectators and crushing small cars.” Cubby looked hopeful. He also looked for a stick.

He was having a good time, which was all that really mattered. We followed the cows all the way through town and down another hill to the Brattleboro Retreat. I told Cubby the retreat was a famous institution for the depressed and insane; his own grandmother had been there once. He had heard stories of her craziness, but she was just a nice old grandmother to him, so I never knew what he made of them. I guess our parents are very different for our kids.

“Will they eat the cows?” Cubby’s focus had shifted a little bit from bull running, but he was not ready to make the topical leap from bulls to insanity. A shift from bull running to bull eating must have seemed more acceptable.

As we descended the hill onto the lawn of the retreat, sounds and smells wafted up to greet us. Cubby’s attention was grabbed by two things: the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream stand and the guy cooking burgers right beside it. “Those burgers might have strolled past us a few minutes ago.” Cubby looked at me and then at the cows, and was momentarily speechless.

I don’t think he had ever really considered the mechanics of converting cows to hamburgers before. He had a general idea that it happened, but there was no evidence of a factory or a machine to bring it about. Yet there it was. Behind us were hundreds of cows, filling the street. In front of us were hundreds of burgers, sizzling on a grill. The process remained a mystery, but the result was unmistakable.

We ate the ice cream instead.

Cubby loved our adventures, but one particular Sunday in June was always special: Father’s Day. That was the day we went to Newport for the big car show.

The year of the Heifer Stroll marked another turning point in our lives: My car company received Chairman Mao’s Mercedes-Benz for restoration. We’ve seen some unusual and sweet cars during my quarter century in business, but that was one of the finest. I had bought the car for a client, and we were just finishing an extensive mechanical overhaul that had lasted six months, through the winter and spring. I was proud of the work we’d done, and I liked the idea that we’d restored a piece of automotive history.

The chairman’s car was just short of thirty years old—one of the last automobiles the Chinese leader ordered before his death in 1976. It was a massive 600 limousine complete with Chinese diplomatic plates and flagstaffs adorned with Chinese embassy flags on both front fenders. The car was four tons of polished black metal, with an interior of hand-stitched red leather, Macassar ebony, and French walnut veneers. With its blacked-out windows and official banners snapping in the breeze, it made a powerful impression.

Even in a crosswalk, cars like that have the right-of-way. That is the wonder of diplomatic immunity. They can run you over, and all the local cops can do is protest to the State Department. Most times, that goes nowhere. What are one or two flat Americans to the ruler of China, with a billion subjects under his thumb?

Of course, we were not diplomats, and the car was no longer an official diplomatic vehicle. We didn’t look the least bit Chinese either. But with darkened side windows and sufficient speed, no one could tell.

Approaching an intersection, the car was sort of like an oncoming train. When you see the locomotive coming, you do not step out onto the tracks, hold up your hand, and ask the engineer for his qualifications. Right-of-way matters little when you face immediate annihilation. They’ll be wrong, but you’ll be dead. So you jump out of the way, quickly. And salute as they roll by, just in case.

That was exactly what the Springfield Police did the first time I took the massive beast for a road test. Inspired by that show of respect, I decided to take the car for a longer run. The Newport Car Show was coming up, and Cubby and I needed a ride.

It’s about a hundred miles from our house to Portsmouth Abbey, where the show is held. We set out at eight in the morning, with a cooler full of drinks and a bag of toys and games. I invited Cubby to ride up front, but the cavernous rear compartment proved irresistible, as I had thought it would. The first part of the journey passed uneventfully, as we rolled down the Mass Pike and Interstate 95. We went through the drive-through at the Sturbridge McDonald’s, but the cashier was so jaded she did not even notice Cubby. The fun really started when we pulled off the interstate onto Route 24 for the final ten miles into Newport.