Fan Boy

It’s a parent’s job to think her child is exceptional.

- Cathy Alter

WHEN LEO WAS 2, after he had mastered words like no and cat, he began saying “Akamahn!” The word baffled me and my husband, Karl. What was our son trying to tell us? He said it with such frequency—Akamahn! Akamahn!—it was as if he were summoning a god. Only after I heard our apartment’s maintenance man in the hallway did I put it together: vacuum.

Leo’s fascination was, it turned out, not with the gods but with the suction power of a Dyson— or, more generally, anything brought to life by energy. Once I figured that out, I spent hours with him, carrying around a desk lamp from outlet to outlet throughout our apartment lobby. Each time the light came on, it illuminated his ecstatic face, and often a slender thread of spittle that hung from his mouth. After Karl came home with a bag of extension cords, Leo linked them together and proceeded to wrap our lobby in one uninterrupted cord like a Christo installation.

One muggy summer day, after we’d been kicked out of the lobby, we stopped by a neighborhood consignment shop. The owner had set up a battalion of oscillating fans on just about every available surface. Leaning over a table to get a closer look at, say, a set of linen tea towels meant holding back hair, necklaces, fingers, to avoid the high speed blades. Leo, though, was fearless, running laps, hands first, around the store. “Dat one!” he’d say with a wildness usually reserved for picking flavors of ice cream. “Dat one!”