Raising Cubby (23 page)

After what happened at Riverside Park, it was a relief to spend the last few weeks of that summer walking around and exploring our new neighborhood. It was the sort of place that lent itself to pedestrian activity. All the streets had sidewalks, there was very little traffic, and most of the dogs did not bite. The main road was quite busy, but our house was a quarter mile back in a little warren of looping streets to nowhere.

I’d gotten Cubby a new two-wheeler when we moved, and he still liked to ride it back and forth as I walked alongside him. We cruised the streets on our side of the highway, all of which were named for various spices. There was Sesame Drive, Honey Lane, Nutmeg Street, and Savory Court. There were Cinnamon, Citron, and Ginger Drives. Finally, there was Basil Road, the street we lived on.

If you entered from the main road, our new home was the fourteenth house on the left, which did not have any particular significance in and of itself, but was certainly better than being house fifteen. I assumed everyone knew fourteen was a better number than fifteen, but Cubby evinced both surprise and indifference
when I reported that fact to him. From a practical perspective, being fourteen houses back from the main road placed us at a comfortable remove from noise and traffic. Fifteen houses back would be better in that respect, but fifteenth was otherwise a less desirable thing to be, since it was an odd number based on five and three, two more odd and unappealing numbers.

On more than one occasion, I explained arithmetical trivia to Cubby, but he never showed much interest. Numerical facts and coincidences seldom elicited more than the slightest of nods. Striking out on mathematical curiosities, I decided to highlight other characteristics of our neighborhood. I could never tell what might strike Cubby’s fancy. One of the first examples I saw was the street names. Our neighborhood was one of spices; his mom lived on a street named for a college. The streets around her were Cornell, Yale, Dartmouth, and Harvard. After explaining the meaning of those names to my son, and getting no response whatsoever, I realized he was too young to appreciate the relationships between street names and real places and things. He didn’t know much about condiments and he knew even less about colleges. His experience with spice was limited to salt and pepper, and the only college he knew was the University of Massachusetts, where his mom went to school.

He was more interested in differences we could see. One of our new neighborhood’s most visible features was the profusion of swimming pools. We had never been anywhere else with such an infestation of pools. There were wading pools in front yards, aboveground pools in backyards, and in-ground pools alongside yards. All were new to Cubby, for there was not a single swimming pool to be seen around our old house in South Hadley. There were no pools where I grew up, either. “This part of Chicopee must be unique,” I told him. On one occasion, Cubby and I actually walked the streets and conducted a count. An amazing 64 percent of the houses around us had swimming pools. They were as common as garages or barbecue grills in other neighborhoods. Of course, our
neighborhood wasn’t short on garages either. More than 90 percent of the homes had garages. I know, because we counted them as well. We couldn’t be as sure about barbecue grills, because people often kept them out of sight when they weren’t being used.

Some say Chicopee is Native American for “plenty,” and that may be true. I know it is in the case of pools and garages. I don’t know how we came to talk of those two household features in one sentence, but there are important differences between them. Garages serve more purposes than pools, and garages need far less maintenance. You could see that on any quick walk. The pools that received care were clear and blue. Those that did not were deep rich shades of green—biology experiments in process. Some had dark misshapen objects floating atop the green. “What are those?” Cubby asked, and I pointed quietly to the pets, small children, and toys that were all around us. “They are the bounty of the neighborhood, returned to the swamp.” Cubby nodded.

“Maybe they grow the spices the neighborhood is named for in those pools,” I suggested. Cubby liked that notion. He always liked ideas that explained mysteries, and the naming of our streets was one riddle we never solved.

When we walked around it was fun to speculate about what our neighbors did or what they were like. Seeing a green swimming pool, it was easy to see what they did not do. Seeing what they did do took closer scrutiny. As I told Cubby, you can deduce a lot from the cars, toys, and machinery in people’s yards. The guy with a van marked Collins Electric was most likely an electrician, though it’s possible he was a spy masquerading as a harmless tradesman. His neighbor, with a Massachusetts State Police car in the driveway, could have been a cop. Either that or he’d stolen the cruiser and was headed for serious trouble with the law himself.

Then there was the house with the gravestone in the front yard. “Does he have his own cemetery?” Cubby asked. I didn’t know, but the ground out back was certainly soft enough. Cubby had accepted
all the other houses and occupations we’d seen with equanimity, but that one troubled him. One day we met our neighbor, a jolly fellow named Kenny, who explained that it wasn’t a gravestone at all. “It’s a monument,” he said. “I don’t even know who’s buried beneath it. I have a business making monuments here in Chicopee. Some are gravestones, but others are just nameplates for homes and buildings. If you die, we can make a monument for you.” I thanked him for his offer; it’s always good to have a monument in reserve, just in case. When I was a kid in Georgia, they sold caskets that way, and farmers kept them in the barn, paid for and ready for use.

My son never did figure out if Kenny had something buried under that stone in his yard, or if it was merely a piece of lawn ornamentation. Kenny sure wasn’t saying.

Then there were Kenny’s other eccentricities. On hot summer days we’d see him at the edge of his yard, shrieking as he plunged a bayonet into the ground. One spearing episode might have been an aberration, but Kenny did it repeatedly and purposefully, walking around his backyard with his eyes focused on the ground. I asked what he was doing, and he told me about his woodchuck problem. “I’m gonna spear the beasts in their lair,” he said with pride and determination. Cubby was puzzled by that, but I explained that Kenny had been to Vietnam to fight in a war and had come back kind of different.

Two homes at the end of our road had tricycles in front. “Those houses have kids living in them,” Cubby announced. Indeed, that was a likely conclusion, but not the only one, I was quick to point out. “The people might not have any kids yet. They may have put the toys outside as bait, the way people dangle shiny lures in front of fish. Maybe they are trying to catch kids of their own, using trikes to entice stray children.”

Unfortunately, as I said the words, two tykes emerged from the house we were passing, climbed on the trikes, and rode them around the house. “Dad! Those are not stray kids!” Cubby crowed.

There were a few places where the grass grew a foot tall and everything was falling apart. We looked closely at those houses, and sometimes stringy-haired, wild people looked back from darkened windows. “Listen close, Cubby, you can hear them rattling their chains inside there.” We speculated about what went on inside. Cubby had not yet seen many horror movies, so his ideas were limited.

“Witches and demons,” I said. “Yeah,” Cubby agreed. “They are probably ready for Halloween every day.” He remembered Stone Kid Road, and the child the wizards had turned to rock a few years before. We agreed it was probably best to stay clear of houses like that, even though there were no stone kids in evidence here. “Maybe this wizard turns them into toads instead.” There was no denying the large toad population in our backyard, and one of the nearby homes had a stone toad a foot tall.

Then there was the house on Sesame Drive that had rocks for a front yard. Not big rocks, mind you. Smaller stones, one to two inches in diameter. The kind of rocks that might once have been cats or beagles, if wizards were in the area. They lay in a nice, well-manicured layer. A stone lawn. They were the size you might pick up and throw, or chew on if you were in the desert. Then there were bigger rocks making little walls around bushes and other ornamentation. Even the front steps were rock; big slabs turned on their sides in place of concrete stairs. That house certainly stood out from all the others.

“Those people must be geologists!” Cubby declared the first time we saw it. That was an immeasurably better, and less threatening, explanation than wizardry. I was sure he was right, and very proud of his deduction. All we wanted was a chance to find out if he was right. Yet as many times as we walked by that house, we never saw anyone outside. We lived in that neighborhood five years, and all that time Cubby never got the chance to discuss rocks and science with the people who created the most unique yard on the street.

Still, it piqued his interest enough that he never forgot. One of his friends at school had a mom who taught geology at the university. One day he asked Karl’s mom about the geologist’s yard.

“If you take a shovel and dig, you’ll find that whole area where you live is beach sand and stone. That’s because it was the original shoreline of glacial Lake Hitchcock, a huge lake that covered this whole area when the glaciers melted, fifteen thousand years ago.”

Cubby was very impressed and curious. It turned out that his own mother knew about Lake Hitchcock, and she told him even more. She told him that when the glaciers began to melt, at the end of the last ice age, they left behind a lot of gravel and rock. Some of that sediment formed a dam forty miles south of us, in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. The Connecticut River backed up behind the dam to form a huge lake. The area where our house stood was at one time submerged under twenty feet of water. Lake Hitchcock lasted three thousand years until the dam broke and the lake drained in a huge flood into the Atlantic Ocean.

“All the sand and stone underground here is actually old lake and river bottom. It’s like the stuff you wade on, when we go out in our boat.” Cubby had been boating with me on the river all his life, so he knew about river sand, but he had not imagined it would be under our house.

Still, that did not explain why that one house had a yard of stone while every other house had a lawn of grass. All the yards might be built atop a layer of sand and stone, but why were all the others covered up by lawn?

One day I got the courage to knock on the door and ask. “Us? Geologists?” The occupant of the house was taken aback. “Hell, no! We work for the postal service. And we keep those rocks nice with Roundup. Good old-fashioned poison.”

I was glad my water didn’t come from a well.

My mother tells me that my first word was
car
. I’d start repeating it over and over, and Mom would pop me in the backseat and drive me around until I fell asleep. After a while, she’d park and quietly carry me in and tuck me in bed. In time, I learned to say the words
Mom
and
Dad
, but talking really started with car.

I’ve sometimes wondered if autistic kids are more comforted by a machine than by a human. My friend Temple Grandin certainly feels that way. She famously made a “squeeze machine” at college to rock and hold her tight. I did something similar as a child when I piled pillows all over me. In fact, I still do that! As an adult, I prefer the company of humans to a car ride, but if my mother’s memory is right, the opposite was true when I was one. I’ve always loved the gentle roll of a train, and nothing can beat a ride through the country in an old convertible Jaguar.

When Cubby was born, I figured I should start him out the way my mother started me. When he got upset, if Mom wasn’t there to jolly him, we’d often go for a ride in the car. Just as they had worked for me, car rides calmed Cubby. He was usually a great passenger. He loved looking out the windows and pointing out the sights.

When I worked on cars, I brought him along and showed him everything I knew. When my Uncle Bill did that with me, I became a little mechanic. Cubby didn’t take after me, though. He just watched. But although he never showed much interest in fixing cars, when he got a little bigger he expressed lots of interest in driving. I couldn’t let him drive on roads with traffic, but I often let him steer around the yard at the marina, and on woods roads where there were no other vehicles. We had an old Land Rover that I drove in the woods, and he liked that because he could steer, we went slow, and there were no cars or pedestrians to run into.

He just loved turning the wheel and feeling the car move from side to side. He’d twist that wheel with the biggest grin! His enthusiasm for such a simple thing reminded me of a B. Kliban cartoon I’d seen long ago, with a little girl smiling at the instrument she holds in her hand. The caption read, “Just give Alice some pencils and she will stay busy for hours.”

By age seven, he was actually pretty proficient at steering. He could drive for miles on backcountry roads and hit hardly anything at all. His only limitation was his size; he could not reach the brake and gas pedals, so he had to sit on my lap. That was okay with me, though, because I was comforted by the knowledge that I could take over should Cubby suddenly aim us for a tree or a cliff.