While Dressed As An Owl

“Well, that was dramatic,” his father said.

Tuesday’s meant something from the Katherine Hepburn canon, and this time, it was On Golden Pond. When Walter was done with his performance, his father could only muster that one bit of feedback and then he went back to his copy of The Atlantic. His mother sighed and asked him to go get ready for bed. It was past eleven, after all, and he had school the next day.

If there was one thing Walter could do, it was memorize things other people had said.

Not quotes so much, but dialogue. Movies. Television shows. Entire seasons of them. He could commit them to memory. That led some (his parents) to hope that perhaps he could memorize useful things as well. Mathematical equations or sections of Ulysses. They were not shy about exposing their eight-year-old son to content far beyond his maturity provided he could be the sort of prodigy that was trotted out at the beginning of parties to play Mozart on the piano without sheet music or recite several poems by Dylan Thomas.

Unfortunately for them, he showed no interest in anything that did not reside in the glitz and glamour of the eighteen-inch television that lived in what they called “the family room” down in the basement by the furnace. He would spend every waking hour watching and mimicking. What was dismissed as “memorization” was actually much deeper. He could get the intonation down. The intention. He understood why the characters were saying what they were saying and what they were really saying and why they weren’t saying what they wanted to say. He put on his father’s coat and played out a detective movie from beginning to end with only mops and old snow shovels as his co-stars.

While his parents were entertaining the podiatrists from across the street, he would be yelling out lines like “But who murdered the butler?” and “Nothing like Paris in December, Larry.” His mother would force a taut smile across her face and comment on how nice it was that children could still enjoy the classics. Meanwhile, his father would be refilling his glass with scotch while wondering whether or not he should have enrolled his son in lacrosse at the age of four as his mother had suggested.

In school, Walter was no academic. His grades were middling to poor and his attention never stayed longer than a holiday houseguest popping by for dessert on the way to some other, better decorated domicile. His teachers would beg him to focus, because they sensed that there could be an intellect there, if only he applied himself, but alas, Walter, though not disrespectful, had no investment in anything but the characters waiting for him in the basement at the end of the day. His parents considered taking away the television, but they worried what that might do to his psyche. Instead, they tried weaning him off it with fancy vacations and outings to nature reserves, but it was all for not. He’d spend every hike and beach day murmuring four episodes of a hospital drama or a two-hour historical saga about Napoleon. His father had to admit that his Josephine was quite compelling.

Eventually, his parents grew not to expect much for Walter in any capacity. If he only ate part of his dinner, that was acceptable. A D on a test? Well, at least it wasn’t an absolute flunk. No friends calling for sleepovers or playdates? Some people were made to walk through life alone. It was the sort of thing that would send most parents searching for a good child psychologist or a book on how to raise a better-adjusted young man, but Walter’s mother was on so many committees and his father was nearing completion on a restoration of a saloon that would be turned into a local tourist attraction. Neither had time for a troubled son, and as long as Walter didn’t appear disgruntled, they chalked it up to “He’ll grow out of it” even though it was more than most people could ever hope to grow out of and Walter showed no signs of slowing down. One night at dinner, he had promised to learn all of Lawrence of Arabia and his mother warned him that if she found sand anywhere in her house, he’d be in big trouble.

That was the last they spoke of anything to do with Walter’s preoccupation until a note arrived home in his backpack a month later inviting his parents to attend a performance of Bambi, which the school would be performing in rep with Saint Joan. Walter’s mother vaguely remembered him telling her something about rehearsals during the school day, but as soon as she saw him holding a script in his hand, she barricaded herself in her room and put on a recording of e.e. cummings reading a Faulkner biography.

His father insisted that they couldn’t miss the show since most of the neighborhood would be there and they didn’t want to come across as uncaring parents. Truly, they were not. It was a simple case of a mother and father facing a disconnect they could not overcome, but they loved Walter a great deal and if he had managed to snag a small part in the school play, then they were proud of him for it. There was certainly no reason to expect that he’d be receiving numerous opportunities throughout his life for great acclaim, so now was as good a time as any to show him support. Inevitably, he would be living in their basement until they were ready to be deposited into an assisted living facility, and that was just fine. He wasn’t bad company, after all, provided he refrained from performing It Happened One Night during dinnertime.

On a slightly rainy spring evening, his parents entered the makeshift theater at Walter’s school not knowing what to expect. The theater was created by sliding all the cafeteria tables against the walls and aiming a few rudimentary lights borrowed from the local community theater against a section of the space where the recycling bins were usually located. A cardboard forest had been erected, and there was a sign on an easel that read “Bambi: A Tragedy.” Walter’s father commented to his wife that the program listed the art teacher as the director and that explained the subtitle since everyone knew she was a vegan.

After the principal had welcomed them all, the performance began with an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience of thirty or so parents gathered on rusty folding chairs on a floor that was perpetually sticky from spilled grape juice. It was only then that Walter’s mother realized she had not consulted the program the way his father had. It was a folded piece of stock paper, and she was worried the blue ink would come off on her hands. She had no idea who her son was playing, but she assumed he was the hunter who brought about the end of the protagonist’s mother. 

To her surprise, Walter was the first actor out onstage. He was dressed like an owl. His mother had forgotten about there being an owl in Bambi. She remembered a skunk and a bunny rabbit and perhaps a warthog and a meerkat, but could not place the owl. It turned out that in this version of the story (adapted freely by the art teacher’s ex-boyfriend) the owl was the narrator. Walter began to speak, and soon, he was leading the audience through pages and pages of exposition. The art teacher’s ex-boyfriend not being much of a dramatist, he never learned the art of “show don’t tell” and so there was very little action onstage or even anything resembling theater. It was also true that many of the children had not wanted to participate in the program, due to stage fright and a resistance towards wearing fur even as a costume. That meant Walter was tasked with creating entire scenes amidst the cardboard trees colored in with magic markers and paint leftover from the Summer Reading mural out in the courtyard.

Most eight-year-olds would have buckled under such pressure, but not Walter. He commanded the stage like a vaudevillian. His parents found themselves looking around at the other mothers and fathers transfixed at what Walter was bringing about using nothing but his voice and an owl costume put together by the school lunch lady using feathers from an old pillow and yellow stockings bought at a nearby Target. Walter’s parents were not surprised that he could memorize such lengthy text, but they were stunned at his ability to convey the emotions of small woodland creatures in ways unthinkable until now.

By the end of the play, as Walter was wiping a single tear from his eye while he elaborated on how Bambi the young buck was now grown with his very own son, the rest of the audience wept with him. Walter’s father had to swallow a sob as the lights went down on Walter, and when they came back up, everyone jumped to their feet. Whistling and hollering ricocheted throughout the cafeteria. While all the children were praised after they had taken their bow, there was a line to see Walter. It was as though he had just made his Broadway debut.

On the way home, Walter’s father and mother continued the adoration. They promised to turn over a new leaf. Now there would be acting lessons and books on theater and a much larger television that would be placed right in the living room so that Walter could continue to hone his craft. It wasn’t until they pulled into the driveway and looked in the backseat that they noticed Walter was fast asleep. He had a smile on his face that indicated a satisfaction of some kind. Perhaps the greatest kind. Tomorrow he would learn new lines and new stories, but as for tonight, he had done what he was supposed to do. He had created something where there was nothing. He spoke and was heard.

And all that while dressed as an owl.