Raising Cubby by John Elder Robison Read Free Book Online Page B

in a loud and unruly manner, aggravated the teachers, and distracted the students. When he started hollering he could disrupta hundred people, maybe more. The commotion he created at college was way out of proportion to his size. The only thing Little Bear could do was take him outside and hope he calmed down. Bouncing and jollying usually worked, but it always took a while and made attending school essentially unworkable. Seeing what happened when she took an infant to college helped me understand why colleges don’t recruit kids until they are teenagers. By then they are somewhat more manageable.
    Things went a little better when Mom went into the lab or the field. Cubby accompanied her and picked up many arcane skills of the anthropologist’s trade, even before he could read and write. He could assemble a dog skeleton from a dusty box of bones, and he knew all about early American glassware from excavating Colonial outhouses and trash pits in historic Deerfield. He had no idea where we lived, but he could describe all the buildings and roads on a map of Deerfield, where his mom was working on her master’s thesis.
    On days when Little Bear couldn’t take Cubby with her, I tried bringing him to work with me. That didn’t work out very well, because I couldn’t watch him and he couldn’t stay still. An inquisitive baby was an amusing or annoying distraction at school, but there was nothing there to hurt him. The situation was very different in a dirty auto-repair shop. We knew grease was unhealthy to eat, and we were really trying to keep him clean. On the days I had Cubby I could not do any useful work because I was forever washing my hands and tending him. Cubby, on the other hand, reveled in filth. He grabbed every opportunity to escape his hamper and crawl across a greasy floor just to put both paws into a big tub of diesel fuel. He would have eaten old car parts, too, if I hadn’t caught him. There’s something irresistible about a nice, chewy fan belt.
    I was also concerned that Cubby would get squashed if he got loose in the yard. My neighbor owned several front-end loaders, and he drove the giant machines back and forth past my doorsseveral times a day. It’s hard to see close up when you’re driving a loader, and I didn’t want my new baby getting squashed.
    Then there was my fellow tenant, Pete the Paver. I took an immediate liking to Pete. Some days, he’d come back from work with hot pavement left in his trucks, and he’d dump it steaming on the driveway by my shop and roll it onto the ground. The trouble was, if Cubby got in front of Pete’s steamroller, he’d be flattened like Wile E. Coyote.
    That made me look out for him real close.
    Before long, the need for a kid-management plan was painfully apparent. We knew there were commercial storage options, but they were costly and their quality was uncertain. We did not want to leave him with a smiling nanny only to discover that we had entrusted our kid to some fiend who chained him to a pipe in the basement and passed the day with her boyfriend upstairs. You never know with some of those places. They seem safe, until you see them on the evening news. Our thoughts returned to my mother, who liked Cubby a lot. We knew we could trust her, she was home, and she always wanted Cubby around. She had not been the best mom when I was little, but she’d mellowed with age and doted on her new grandchild.
    Also, my mother really liked Little Bear. I think she saw her as the daughter she had never had. So they made a deal. Little Bear would bring Cubby, his diapers, and his other paraphernalia over to my mother’s house in the morning. Then she’d go to school and return to pick him up in the afternoon.
    My mother was in that first year of recovery from her stroke, and Cubby’s need for constant attention turned out to be good for her. He kept her awake and active as she chased him through the house in her wheelchair. The two of them even learned to walk