Life, Animated by Ron Suskind Read Free Book Online Page A

stories about him and other kids at his blighted high school won me the Pulitzer Prize. Those stories were, in essence, about beauty—as well as native intelligence and sensitivity—lying within, though these qualities are often hard to find and harder to measure, something we humans seem so anxious to do: to dole out credit and rewards. This was all on display in the portrait of Cedric and his peers at the gang-dominated high school. Readers were moved by the recognition of how hollow so many of our judgments are—something Cornelia and I began to slowly acknowledge around the time Eric, the Down syndrome kid, hugged us that day in Owen’s classroom.
    And now, in my hand, is a prize that, of course, has utterly the opposite effect in the reactions it draws. Like so many prizes, it’s the ultimate shorthand for instant, tell-a-book-by-its-cover judgment. It’s basically attached to your name—all people need to hear. These ironies are visible only to Cornelia and me, as are the ways our private struggle is now driving my professional life.
    Owen, though, had a statement on the matter. Not long after I won the prize, he noticed it. A Pulitzer isn’t like one of those peace medals, or the Nobels, with a golden disk hanging from a ribbon. It’s quite small, a Tiffany & Co. crystal about the size of a plum with an engraving of Joseph Pulitzer’s head next to your name. We put it on a waist-high table in the living room of the Georgetown house, next to some framed pictures. That’d be right in Owen’s line of sight. It was only when he got close to the window that a shard of reflected sunlight coming off the crystal caught my eye. I was reading on the couch, which meant I could flip over its low back onto the floor and lunge. I caught his cocked hand as he was about to throw it through the window.
    Cornelia and I had some good yuks at the irony— Owen sees right through the bubble of reputation —and then made sure to place it on a high mantel over the fireplace in our new house.
    That new house is where Cornelia is calling from to tell me about bootylyzwitten. We used Random House’s advance for the book as a down payment on a modest three-bedroom house in DC’s northernmost corner near the Maryland line.
    Of course, recognition of irony is no barrier to action. Prize in hand, we start to feel lucky again, for the first time in years, and empowered enough to shape the world into whatever we need it be, for Owen’s sake. For every why , suddenly there seems to be a why not . Nothing dramatic. We just go a little crazy, in a very conventional way: we start to undervalue our fears and over-appreciate our hopes.
    That means a change for Owen. A journey of hope has begun. Specifically, he’s now spending half his days at Ivymount and half at a lovely little preschool in Cleveland Park with mostly typical kids from a privileged world. The school, called NCRC, was originally the National Child Research Center when it was founded by a Rockefeller grant in the 1920s as a place to study child development. The legacy of that, many decades later, is that they take a handful of special needs kids each year. It isn’t easy to get in. But among an array of lawyers and lobbyists, think-tank chiefs and investment types, the family of a national affairs reporter for the Journal —who just won a Pulitzer for those stories about the hidden virtues of kids from the cross-town slums—is an indispensable addition. Yes, that’s the way Washington works.
    Cornelia is now racking up more miles than a long-haul trucker and is happy to do it, driving Owen north to Ivymount each morning, often volunteering at the school, grabbing coffee, or grocery shopping at a nearby mall—anything to kill a few hours—then handing him a bag lunch to eat in the car and racing down to NCRC, where he spends afternoons in the aptly named “Sunshine Room.” There he’s mixing with typical kids. The idea—loosely supported by our therapists—is that