Tackling Giants
A few weeks ago we were the lucky recipients of another unlikely invitation. This time one of Lio’s surgeons from New York had invited Lio and me to be his guests at the first ever regular-season NFL game to happen outside of the US. As Marina drove us to the brand new Wembley Stadium memories of football outings with my own dad came flooding back. He used to take me and my brothers to Giants games in the Meadowlands when we were kids and it was a bit surreal to be completing the circle with Lio on the other side of the ocean. This time it was very easy just to smile and happily let go to fate.
We met our contact Allison by the enormous statue of Bobby Moore out in front of Wembley and she and her colleagues ushered us down through a labyrinth of security personnel, fluorescent bracelets and key-carded doors until we emerged on the field. Lio was not at all as shell-shocked as I expected him to be surrounded by tens of thousands of cheering people. We were led to Dr. Handsome by the Giants’ benches (he is the official knee surgeon of the New York Giants – hence his ability to get us down on the sidelines). Lio beamed at him straight away. He introduced us to the Giants’ owner, John Mara, and to some enormous football players. I had told Lio that they were going to be big guys but I don’t think he had really understood. He kept asking them “How did you get so big.” “Eating vegetables” was the usual response which neither Lio nor I took seriously. They were all, every single one of them from the owner, to the players, to the Giants’ media people who were escorting us around, to the other doctors, to even the police officers working security, absolutely and wonderfully kind to us. As soon as they saw Lio on my shoulders they would shout “Hey big guy!” or something over the roar of the crowd; it was as if they knew somehow to treat Lio like a little hero. Maybe they were told about us ahead of time (some of them certainly), or maybe it was just Lio radiating his natural charm, but they all seemed to go out of their way to make Lio (and me) feel special.
Lio covered his ears when the fireworks started going off for the pre-game show, but he soon lost interest in the hand shaking and the winks from the cheerleaders and started asking me “Will there be tackling?” Someone at school must have told him about “tackling” because he really got quite fixated on it. Just in time for the opening kick-off I hoisted him on my shoulders again and he was treated to a resound “crack” of a tackle about ten yards in front of him on the field. We watched about ten minutes of the first quarter on the field before we made our way to our seats. Just before the half-time kick-off – and, for better or for worse this is Lio’s abiding memory of the game – one of the referees (at least someone dressed like a referee) took off all his clothes and streaked on to the field. I was quite amazed at how long he managed to evade the police and pulled off some quite intricate dance moves for about a minute and a half. Of course this was impossible to contextualize for Lio who now thinks that every football game has a streaker at half-time. Lio’s first experience of American football will certainly take some beating.
A few weeks later Lio’s grandmother had booked us a family vacation on the Disney cruise in the Carribean. I must admit I was a bit apprehensive. This was to be Lio’s first real dose of the Mouse (beyond some films that he had seen on planes) and I wasn’t sure how he would respond to the hard-core kiddie drug that is Mickey et al. He was ecstatic the whole time, hobbling around the ship after Captain Jack, doing morning exercises with Goofy, giving high-fives to Mickey, going to kite making workshops, watching song-and-dance shows every night, doing treasure hunts on our island stopovers and swimming in a Mickey-shaped pool. He was a whirlwind. But it wasn’t all indulgence: he was particularly proud of the fact that he was one of the few kids on the ship that wasn’t drinking Coca Cola with breakfast, everyday we kept up with his speech and language exercises (usually followed by an afternoon snooze to recharge) and he even insisted on bringing his violin with us so that he could show grandmom and his cousin Jordan what he had been practicing in his music therapy. There were plenty of times when he needed carrying because his knee was giving him a bit of jip (he’s heavy now), and there were times when he was a bit over-exuberant climbing things he shouldn’t have, but we came back tanned and happy and with me only slightly worse for wear from all the free/cheap booze on board.
Back in physiotherapy though his leg in only now just getting back to bending as much as it was before we went away. I’m finding it simply exhausting (well-nigh impossible) keeping up with the home programmes for both his leg and his speech and language. Out of urgency and necessity for months his leg work was taking most of our concentrated energy. But since the summer we’ve been working more and more on his language. I really hear the pay-off – he’s speaking better and thinking better. But something a bit troubling has cropped up: he’s now speaking mostly English to me even as he insists that I speak only Italian to him. He can get quite animated when I speak English and this, I suspect, is because Italian was exclusively the language of our happy family before the accident. But as he’s learning more and more English in school and speaking it more fluently with his friends, his English is now better than his Italian. It’s an odd scene in public when he is yelling at me in English to speak Italian to him.
Over the past month we’ve had some extremely useful conversations with doctors, neurologists and psychologists – conversations I wish I had had nine months ago but wasn’t really able to because of the pressures of the moment. I mentioned the bilingual issue to all of them and the consensus seems to be that I should concentrate in a formal way on English for a variety of reasons: Its grammar is simpler, it’s more “word rich,” but its phonetics are extremely inconsistent. The thinking is that concentrating the formal language learning on English would both be easier for him structurally and conceptually, and (because we would be memorizing phonetically irregular words as “facts” at this stage of his development) would reduce the risk of him having problems with abstract language thinking and dyslexia in the future. Also, at around Lio’s age, language tends to “lateralize” to one side of the brain. This lateralization is a good thing and helps with more abstract thinking in the future. His injuries might impede that lateralization which means that this is an especially important time for stable, structured, consistent and uncomplicated language input (especially vocabulary building) which means English. This seems quite a poke in the eye to all of my own writing and thinking about language for the past twenty years, but the poetry of grown-ups and the exigencies of my five-year-old are two very different things (I tell myself).
What’s far more troubling to me are the symbolic and emotional implications of this. Lio loves to think of himself as someone who speaks more that one language. He loves telling people how many languages he can speak and loves demonstrating them. Italian is a fundamental part of his identity. Beyond that, Italian is perhaps Sasha’s greatest gift to Lio. She worked so hard to teach him the language; from the instant he was born she spoke to him in Italian and in four-and-three-quarter years maybe spoke English to him five times – only when she was really upset with him. For my part, I spoke English to him in the first couple of months when the absolute clarity of my expressions of affection seemed more important than what he was doing with the words coming in through his ears and down into his newborn brain. But by the time he was two months old I was speaking only Italian to him as well. It was his first language and it was “our language,” our secret code, the language of good food and holiday adventures, the language of fun in the mountains, and dragons and knights and wizards and castles. It would break what’s left of my heart to watch that wither away. So I’m a bit stuck. About two weeks ago I started speaking more English to him when we do his homework, and when we read English books together I no longer translate them on the fly. The strategy I think I may adopt, and one the medical people are OK with, would be to “work” formally at English (study it, concentrate on learning words, get the agreements right, etc.) while continuing to speak Italian to him casually while playing and doing what needs doing as a part of everyday life. And he’s got Marina with whom he speaks only Italian.
We’re going out to Italy for Christmas, Lio’s birthday and New Year’s. And Italian will embrace us again. While we’re out there we’ll try to organize a little stone marker for Sasha. Penny, Nigel and I spent a couple of days when we were last in Italy trying to find a stone mason, and then a quarry, with just the right stone: that special orangey-pink marble you find only in the Dolomites. After driving through the dark and the rain for hours in a little valley beneath Monte Pelmo (Sasha’s favourite mountain), asking at bars and road-side stores where the stone from the towns’ fountains came from, we found the quarry (I think). It was closed when we got there so maybe we’ll go back again this winter in-between parties and sledding excursions to see what they can do for us.
We will remember Sasha in England as well. The Scholarship Fund we set up in her name at the University of Kent at Canterbury continues to grow apace. I have been simply astounded at the generosity of people. And I mean not just our old friends and family, but the international academic community to which Sasha was so important, and to the wider community of people in Lewes. The time and the energy of people to raise money (more events and fundraisers than I can count), and their own contributions has simply been staggering. The Friends of the Lewes Arms, the Lewes Constitutional Club, Harvey’s (the local brewery), my friends and colleagues have just got on with it and generated thousands of Pounds for the scholarship. We’re going to make the first annual award of the Sasha Roberts Scholarship in January at the university.
We have some other celebrations to organize before then though. Not least of which is Lio’s birthday party. This will be his first birthday party with all of his school friends and he is positively ecstatic. Last weekend he carefully wrote out the names on invitations for most of the people he wanted to invite. This was the best writing I’ve ever seen him do which really heartens me. As with most things, motivation and perspective are more than half the game. He was a bit too excited in school the day he gave out the invitations and has been asking me how long until his party at least ten times a day since then. He is so happy and I’m going to let him go on being happy. This is really more than a birthday party, it’s a celebration of how miraculously well he’s doing and of how far he’s come this past year. Basking in his reflected joy is also wonderfully good for chasing away worries about English and Italian, about Ritalin and amantadine, about language acquisition and leg bending and the like. It just does me good.