Following Ezra, page 13
“Ezzy,” I say, “you know what you’re doing today?”
He answers with a litany: “Dave’s gym is one, Temple Isaiah is two, Smart Start is three, home is four, playing with water is five, dinner is six, dessert is seven, bath time is eight, reading books is nine, time to go to bed is ten, getting in Abba and Ima’s bed is eleven.” He has calibrated his routine down to the part where he regularly wakes up in the middle of the night and, unable to get back to sleep, sneaks under our covers.
“What’s the number after eleven?” he asks.
“Twelve comes after eleven,” I answer.
“Waking up is twelve, making pancakes is . . . what’s after twelve?”
“Thirteen,” I say.
“Making pancakes is thirteen. Sarah’s gym is . . . What’s after thirteen?”
“Fourteen.”
“Sarah’s gym is fourteen.” Sarah’s gym is what he calls the therapeutic center he visits for occupational therapy once a week. It’s late in the school year, and he has been repeating his weekly and daily schedules for long enough that he keeps it all in his mind. Stunned, I ask him to start again.
“Dave is one, Temple Isaiah is two . . .”
I interrupt: “What’s seven?”
He doesn’t pause: “Dessert is seven.”
“What’s five?”
“Playing with water is five.”
I almost pull the car over to the curb. At the time, Ezra seems to spend most of his waking hours in a fog. He is distracted, distant, and always in motion; he can’t hold a conversation, echoes questions instead of answering them, looks off into space most of the time, flaps his hands, and resists attempts to engage him. He can’t even count on his own past the number eleven.
And yet.
And yet he has been paying attention all along—so much so that he has internalized and mastered the patterns of his daily and weekly schedule; so much so that he knows it forward and—
“Ezzy,” I ask, “can you tell me backward?”
Silence.
I help him out by starting: “Sarah’s gym is fourteen, making pancakes is thirteen,” I say.
He picks up from there: “Waking up is twelve, getting in Ima and Abba’s bed is eleven . . .” He continues all the way to one.
Though I’m not sure how he does it, I come to realize that Ezra has an unusual, facile mind, an ability to absorb data, discern patterns, and keep track of it all. As with many of his traits, he reveals that aptitude inconsistently. He can’t call on it at will—at least, not on request. But knowing that he has this well-concealed ability makes me regard him differently, and the closer I watch and listen, the more I see him display his nimble mind.
We are on a family visit to relatives in Portland when Shawn, at the wheel, stops the minivan at a traffic light. Ezra, then six, suddenly murmurs something.
“What, honey?” Shawn asks.
Ezra mutters four numbers: “One, two, four, two,” he says.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“That house has numbers.”
I glance over at a brown one-story house where we are stopped. Above the door are the four digits of the address: 1242.
“That’s the address,” Shawn tells him.
“Bubbe has numbers on her gray house,” he says casually. “Bubbe has two, seven, six, and four.”
He is correct. The five of us have been staying for only a few days at my parents’ house, the home of my childhood. Somehow, when we weren’t looking, Ezra has memorized the street number: 2764.
“That’s called the address,” I repeat. “That’s the number of the house. Do you know what our address is in Los Angeles?”
Ezra doesn’t hesitate: “Nine, three, one, seven.”
Correct.
“What’s Nicholas’s address?” Nicholas is the boy who lives in the gray two-story house next to ours.
“Nicholas is nine, three, two, three,” he says. I’m stunned. “And Zach is nine, three, one, six.” Zach lives across the street. Right again. Ezra isn’t showing off. The tone in his voice isn’t boastful. He is simply reporting facts, ticking off the digits as if recalling what he had for lunch. He doesn’t even seem to notice how astonished Shawn and I—and even Ami—are at his ability to recall these numbers. We continue quizzing him. He knows the five-digit address of Dave’s gym back home; of friends who once hosted us in Redlands; a relative’s vacation house on the Oregon coast.
“How do you remember that stuff?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer at first. I ask again.
“I just know,” he says.
As Shawn keeps driving, I glance back at Ezra, now staring blankly at the passing traffic, the trees and buildings, and wonder what else he has been storing in his mind as he travels through the world.
Again and again, I am flabbergasted by Ezra’s ability to recall information: names and places, experiences and numbers. As we drive in an unfamiliar neighborhood, he will suddenly speak up from the backseat: “Are we near Baskin-Robbins? . . . This is close to the Barnes and Noble.” His uncanny internal GPS seems all the more astonishing because it so contrasts with his appearance, the way Ezra looks off into the air, the way he seems to be lost in his own thoughts and looping monologues. The more I experience his surprising memory, the more I come to realize that he is nearly always paying attention—perhaps even more so when he seems the most remote.
It isn’t just places or dates he can commit to memory. When Ezra is nine, during a remodeling project we relocate to a compact apartment where the three boys share a cramped bedroom. The first night there, frustrated with the effort to settle them down to bed, I promise to tell them a special bedtime story.
With most of our books in storage—or not yet unpacked—I concoct one on the spot, a simple tale about three purple alligators and a magic waffle. To my surprise, the boys listen with unusual enjoyment and focus.
The next night they beg me to continue.
What began as a desperate measure soon evolves into a nightly ritual. Although I feel increasing pressure to create fresh plots and introduce new characters—an uncle visiting from Israel, a younger sister who can utter only one word—the boys are indiscriminate critics, lapping up each new chapter as I make it up.
I know the stories are accomplishing my goal of getting the boys into bed. What I don’t realize is that Ezra is keeping close track. One evening many months after that first week in the apartment, he tells me he wants to make a list of all the alligators’ adventures.
“I don’t remember them all,” I say.
“Let’s make a list,” he insists.
I sit down at the computer, and he dictates to me, recalling the plots one at a time, reminding me of the major developments—“When Jimmy became invisible . . . When Joey saw a penguin in the kitchen . . .” I conjured up the stories on the spot, but would feel hard-pressed to remember any details even hours later. Without hesitating, Ezra recalls one episode after another—“Episode four: when the alligators changed colors . . . Episode twenty: Mike the magician comes . . . Episode twenty-seven: when Cousin Fernando visited”—until he has recited the plots of twenty-nine chapters.
Does he have a photographic memory? Not exactly. Ezra has a quirky memory. Like almost everything else about Ezra’s mind, it is unique, inconsistent, and subject to his whims, passions, and interests. One can’t simply give Ezra lists or books or items to remember. His mind doesn’t work that way. (In fact, he seems resistant to the kind of remembering that might be helpful in school.) Ezra’s feats of memorizing seem effortless. If I find them astounding, it is partly because he doesn’t work at remembering my alligator stories or the numbers he sees on buildings. He does it all so casually that he hardly understands the unusual mental prowess he possesses.
His memory reflects what matters to him. That becomes clear when he starts reading billboards. If we lived in Detroit, the massive signs lining our roads and freeways might have advertised for SUVs and pickups, and perhaps Ezra would have become an expert on the latest behemoths rolling off the assembly lines at Ford and Chevy. If our home had been in Las Vegas, maybe he would have mastered casinos.
But in Los Angeles, where practically every major thoroughfare is littered with billboards—massive, intrusive, abominable, inescapable—they nearly all advertise one thing: movies.
At some point early in his life, before we know he can read in a meaningful way, Ezra begins noticing the images from the animated movies he so loves—Shrek, Nemo, Piglet—on the massive advertisements he spies from his vantage point in the backseat. When he is in third grade, he begins talking about the sequel to the movie Shrek.
“Shrek 2 is coming in May,” he keeps repeating. An observation quickly evolves into a mantra. Day and night, he reminds us that Shrek 2 will arrive in theaters in May. In Ezra’s perception, the billboards aren’t hints or even strong suggestions. They are marching orders. He never considers the possibility that he might not see the movie within days of its release any more than most people would consider bypassing Christmas. And he permanently etches the date—May 19, 2004—in his memory.
I don’t know it at the time, but that date becomes one of the cornerstones of an abstract calendar Ezra is beginning to construct in his mind, an elaborate spreadsheet on which he quietly hangs tidbits of data, one at a time. Every time he views a new trailer at the theater or on TV, he silently takes note. Every time he spots a movie placard on the side of a city bus, every time he glimpses a film ad in the newspaper, Ezra tucks the information somewhere in the date book he is building in his brain: Home on the Range, April 2, 2004 . . . Shark Tale, October 1, 2004 . . . The Incredibles, November 5, 2004.
Just as when he memorized the street addresses or the alligator stories, Ezra does not appear to be exerting effort in building his mental almanac. Absorbing the information comes as naturally to him as breathing or eating his morning cereal. He can’t stop himself; something compels him to attach numbers to movies.
That impulse manifests itself in surprising ways. On a visit to the Blockbuster store, Shawn and I are perusing the shelves, trying to agree on a movie to rent one Saturday evening, when I notice Ezra methodically making his way through the “family” section, grabbing one video box at a time and holding it close to his face like a butterfly collector examining a specimen. Keeping my distance, I watch for a few minutes as again and again, he repeats the same methodical motion: snapping up a video, scrutinizing its packaging, then replacing it on the shelf and moving on to the next. Lion King. Mulan. Tarzan.
“What are you doing?” I finally ask.
He doesn’t respond, just repeats the odd, machinelike movements. I lean over and put my face close to his to get his attention.
“Ez, what are you doing?”
“Nothing I’m just . . .” He trails off.
“What are you looking at, Ezzy?”
“Running times,” he says.
“Running times?” I ask.
“I’m seeing what the running times are,” he says. “Now just let me be.”
He keeps going, and I step away as my son continues plowing through the Blockbuster aisle.
It all goes into his catalog, the database in Ezra’s head: premiere dates, running times, DVD release dates, names of studios and directors and voice-over actors. Sometimes he shares the information, usually at random moments, when nobody else is talking about movies.
“The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Running time: seventyfour minutes,” he says while we wait for our order at the pizza place.
“Toy Story 2 is ninety-two minutes,” he says as he gets in the car after gym class.
At eight years old, Ezra cannot tell time, and if you were to ask him the length of his lunch break or how many minutes the ride home from school takes, he would answer with a blank stare. His fixation with movie running times isn’t about time or schedule or even what might be the best length for a movie. It’s another number for his chart.
Even in the realm of movie release times, he fixates on obscure bits of trivia with meaning only to him.
“I noticed something different, Abba,” he announces to me one day in the car with great excitement. I expect that it might be about school or the house, but it’s this: “Dreamworks running times have hours and minutes.”
I can tell from his tone that this is important to him, but I’m not sure what he means.
“Like, Finding Nemo says one hundred minutes,” he says. “But Shrek says it’s one hour, twenty-nine minutes.”
Okay. I think I understand. “Is it just Shrek?” I ask.
“No, all the Dreamworks movies say hours and minutes, but all the other studios just say minutes,” he says. “I just noticed that!”
It’s hard to know how to respond. I feel awe and wonder that my son’s mind is so focused and discerning that he has spotted such a minuscule distinction. I am reminded of the singular journey of raising this boy. I know well the feeling of cheering on Ami when he catches a fly ball in a Little League game, the joy of admiring Noam’s elaborate Lego creations. But this is something few parents experience: Ezra’s ability to revel in what appear to be meaningless digits.
Of course, to him, they aren’t meaningless at all.
To Ezra, the numbers—the addresses, the years and months, the hours and minutes—hold profound meaning. He invests in them the sort of significance other children place in the fine print on the back of baseball cards, or, say, their PlayStation scores. The difference is that children value those numbers because they are part of a shared experience, passions that connect them with other human beings; they trade cards with their friends; they play video games against opponents. The numbers are important because they provide entry points to conversations, to rivalries, to friendships.
Ezra, on the other hand, is building his mountain of obscure movie statistics on his own, invisibly assembling an internal almanac that only he can see, filled with data that has meaning only to him. He doesn’t memorize the running time of Shrek to impress the other kids on the playground; that wouldn’t occur to him. He doesn’t do it to make conversation; he doesn’t value that.
So why does he do it? Ezra craves the concrete. He has a deep need for structure, for things that won’t change. His mind has trouble comprehending spoken language; lights feel too bright; tastes seem too strong; he feels uncomfortable in his own body; conversations and social situations leave him bewildered. The world is in constant flux, but the Toy Story DVD will always be eighty minutes long and the numbers above his grandmother’s door will never change.
Mastering new realms of data brings him a feeling of calm that helps Ezra to feel at ease in the world. Yet the process is so invisible that I often don’t know what new information he is committing to memory until he has already mastered it.
That’s what happens with the “Disney Days” calendar. The calendar is a gift from my parents, who have a tradition of treating their grandchildren to tenth-birthday trips. They took our niece to a weekend in San Francisco, and accompanied Ami and a cousin—both passionate baseball fans at the time—to the All-Star game.
Not long before Ezra’s turn, my parents visit us. Eager to inform Ezra about his upcoming trip, they sit down with him one afternoon at our computer.
“I want to show you something really special,” my mother tells her grandson. It is difficult to grab his attention, until she gets him to focus on the Web site on the screen: Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the theme park in Orlando.
“How would you like to go there?” my mother asks him.
“Ooooh, I would like that!” Ezra says.
“Well,” she tells him, “Grandpa and I are going to take you there for your tenth birthday in January.”
“Ooooh!” he says. “Can we go soon?” He is thrilled, but the trip is nearly three months away. My mother has planned for this with a small gift: a desktop calendar with a page for every day, each bearing a picture from a Disney movie. She has marked the page when they will fly to Orlando, to help him count down the days in anticipation.
Ezra keeps it on a shelf in a corner of his room, each morning remembering to tear off a new page, revealing the new day.
He maintains that practice for the weeks leading up to his trip, and then continues after his return. I don’t pay much attention to the calendar until December of that year—more than a year after he first receives the calendar, and many months after the trip (a heavenly week for him). In his room one night, I notice the expired pages he has kept in a neat, orderly stack next to the calendar. I pick up a few to take a look.
“Put that back!” he demands.
I do. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Leave it there. Don’t touch those.”
I’m not sure why.
“I like them there.”
“Can I look at them?” I ask.
I can tell he doesn’t want me to. Ezra’s bedroom has an order that only he understands. I have always sensed that it makes him feel good—secure and comforted—to know where his most important possessions are.
“I just want to look for a second,” I tell him. I pick up the stack and begin flipping through the pages, spotting a movie I like.
“Finding Nemo,” I say.
“Finding Nemo, released May thirtieth, 2003,” he replies.
I didn’t even know I was quizzing him. He is across the room, nowhere near the calendar.
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“I just know,” he says.
I thumb to another picture.
“The Lion King,” I say.
He doesn’t hesitate. “Lion King. June twenty-fourth, 1994.”
I try a movie I’m not sure he has seen.
“Lady and the Tramp.”
“Lady and the Tramp,” he says, “release date June twenty-second, 1955.”
I look at the stack—hundreds of pages—and wonder how many he could know. I grab another page at random and, instead of the movie title, read the date.
