The Lives of Genius
A Boy Meets World/Girl Meets World Fanfic
By Auburn Red
Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me, of course you know that. They belong to Michael Jacobs and Disney. There is a reference and later cameo/guest appearance by Michael Ginsberg from Mad Men and he belongs to Matthew Weiner and Lionsgate. I created the characters of Tom and Nancy Minkus. There are some other original characters and they will be noted accordingly. :D The order of the Boy Meets World episodes may not be right but I thought it worked for this episode.
This chapter will refer strongly to the episodes "Once in Love With Amy," "The Play's The Thing," and "Kid Gloves."
Author's Note: Because of developments in the Girl Meets World canon, i.e. "Girl Meets Farkle," this story's status has been moved to an AU story. Think of it as what if Jennifer's personality hadn't changed much and was the same "darling" we knew in her high school years?
A series of short stories about Stuart and Farkle Minkus through the years.
Chapter One: Grandfather Genius (Stuart Minkus Age 11)
Stuart Minkus walked dejectedly through the sidewalk, Mr. Feeny's words echoed through his brain: You're wrong, Mr. Minkus!...How could he be wrong? He was never wrong in school! This was ridiculous! It was insane to get this bent out of shape over one lousy word problem, but how could his calculations not fit? All he had in school were his grades, if he didn't have those what was he? Maybe his parents were right maybe there was something wrong with him! Maybe the other kids like Cory Matthews and Shawn Hunter were right, he was weird! He kicked the leaves in contempt barely acknowledging the excited shouting from the other kids particularly Cory and Shawn who were no doubt getting their friends together for some sport like baseball or perhaps a game of taunting the nerd. Stuart didn't want to deal with it, so he turned around and made for a shortcut.
When Stuart Minkus was at a moral conundrum, he knew of only one place to go, the closest thing to an oracle that he knew in Suburban Philadelphia and it wasn't home (Mom and Dad would probably be at the hardware store anyway). It was to the house down their street, the home of Grandpa Ginsburg. .
Grandpa Malachi Ginsburg was the only adult that was a blood relation that Minkus felt close to. His paternal grandmother died when his father was still a teenager and his maternal grandmother and her second husband died before Minkus could even form a mental image in his head of what they looked like.
Grandpa Minkus was a different story. Even up to when he died when Stuart was 6, he always filled Stuart with fear. When Stuart was three years old, he saw the concentration camp tattoo on his arm and naively asked him what the numbers meant. Grandpa Minkus became furious and whacked the boy on the bottom. Stuart's father then grabbed him by the arm, slapped him, and told him never to ask about it again. Stuart obeyed. (He later learned about the Holocaust and the story of how his grandfather survived those days and felt sympathy for him, but he still remember that encounter and how it filled him with dread). Grandpa Minkus was a stern man who almost never smiled and often derisively talked about his son's son when Stuart was in ear shot saying he "had his head in the clouds" and asking Tom Minkus if he was turning his son into a sportsman, which Tom always answered, "I'm working on it, Dad."
Grandpa Ginsburg however had a bond with the boy that the two shared being mutual geniuses. They often talked about problems in the world, or school issues. Sometimes they played games or shared a secret language and sat on the roof of either Stuart's or Ginsburg's house to stargaze. Unlike other adults with the possible exception of Mr. Feeny, Minkus knew where he stood with his grandfather and knew that the old man was proud of him no matter what.
He found the elderly man sitting on the front porch facing a table with his hand on small objects. Minkus didn't have to look too closely to see that he was playing his favorite dice game, farkle. He pounded on the table with an excited, "Ha!" He wrote on a pad and paper not doubt tabulating the score. The older man looked up with a smile. He still dressed in his black clothes, berets, and his goatee now long grayed from age, a testament to his young beatnik days. "Stuart," Ginsburg greeted his grandson with a warm hug. "What a farkle it is to see you boy!" Minkus smiled thinly at the secret language that the two shared. "Grandfather, I live just down the road. It's hardly a surprise," he said interpreting the definition.
Ginsburg nodded. "True, my boy, but it is always a joyous occasion," he reminded him of the other secret definition. He looked closely at his grandson. "Though it doesn't look so joyous to you. What happened?"
"How do you know something happened?" Minkus inquired.
"When someone comes walking up to my porch with a long face like that, I think one of two things, either he's got troubles or he's been drafted," Ginsburg said.
Minkus looked at his grandfather confused. "Grandpa, the United States government ended the draft after the Vietnam War was completed and I'm only 11!"
The older man smiled and nodded. "Then you got troubles, want to talk about it?" He invited the boy to sit on the porch by his side while he held the dice inside the cup and gave it a shake. "Now come on let it fire. Let it sparkle. Be ready to give yourself a farkle!" He invited his grandson. The two continued to roll the dice counting the fives for 50, the 1s for 100 and so on. The two even guessed how many points the next roll would be. "1,000," Minkus guessed. Ginsburg then lifted the cup and counted. He had a photographic memory when it came to numbers. He could just look at something or be asked a problem and would instantly be able to calculate it in his head. So Minkus knew that his grandfather was purposely pausing for suspense. "Cosmic, you learned at your grandpa's knee!" He gathered the dice and rolled it again. "1500," Minkus guessed how many points the dice was going to add.
"Aces again," Ginsburg replied. "Genius, my boy, pure genius."
Minkus' face fell. "I don't think I am anymore."
"Now who says," Ginsburg demanded. "Tell me and I'll give them what for!"
"Nobody, "Minkus said. "I got a word problem wrong in school. Mr. Feeny asked it and I gave the answer but he told me it was the wrong one."
"What was the question?" Ginsburg asked.
Minkus recalled. "If Al washes a car in 6 minutes and Fred washes a car in 8 minutes, how long would it take for them to wash the car together?"
"4.5 minutes," Ginsburg said almost as soon as his grandson finished the question.
"That's what I said," Minkus said in shock. "Mr. Feeny said it was wrong!"
Ginsburg was about to object but he held up one finger as if to say wait a minute. He and his grandson then scribbled furiously different facts and figures on the paper. After a few minutes, Minkus looked closely at his grandfather. "Are you alright, Grandpa?"
Ginsburg shrugged. "I don't know but with these calculations, you may end up inventing time travel before you solve this problem to Feeny's liking."
"You know, Grandfather, I've been reading about child prodigies going to seed," Minkus said. "Sometimes they peek before they reach their teens and twenties, what if that's happening to me?"
The older man waved his hand. "Nonsense, Stuart, you should never doubt yourself, Little Man. When all is said and done, you're all you got. Sometimes you got to find the sparkle to make the fire."
"I don't know Grandpa," Minkus reasoned. "Sometimes I'm not so sure that it wouldn't be so bad being normal like most of the other kids."
"Normal is overrated," Ginsburg said sagely. Minkus smiled thinly at the familiar quote.
"Everyone at school thinks I'm weird," Minkus pointed out. "Maybe they're right."
"Sure if everyone says so it must be true," Ginsburg said matter-of-factly. "I'm sure not everyone thinks you're weird. What about that girl, Tilly? Tippy?"
"Topanga," Minkus corrected knowing with his memory his grandfather was just putting him on.
Ginsburg nodded. He met Topanga Lawrence once, a sweet girl with very crimped hair and a unique style. "Yes, a name like Tilly isn't special enough for a girl like her." Minkus smiled at the compliment of the girl he had a crush on. "She doesn't think you are weird does she? If she does, she certainly has no room to talk."
"No, she likes me for how I am," Minkus said.
"Alright then that's hardly everyone," Ginsburg said.
"It's not just at school," Minkus confessed. "Do you think that there is something wrong with me like…?" He didn't want to finish.
"Like your mother and father do," Ginsburg prompted. The genius nodded and shrugged. Ginsburg cupped his beloved grandson's face in his hands. "Stuart, your mother and I say this with the love that a father bears for his only begotten daughter, his blood, is a wonderful woman but she has a terminal disease that she inherited from her late mother, God if there is one rest her soul, if she had one. She wants to be ordinary and it was her unfortunate luck that she married a man with the same drive to be the most ordinary normal couple on the block. You however took after me and that's something in which to be proud."
"Mother and Father don't always think so," Minkus reasoned. He remembered earlier when his father tabulated the receipts earned at the end of the day at the hardware store. Even though Dad used a calculator he computed the numbers wrong and was completely off the mark. Stuart corrected him on the error and well his parent's response was not very congratulatory to say the least. "I think they are afraid of me."
"Well I'm not," Ginsburg remarked. "Come inside, kid, and I'll fix you some green tea. We can look through my windows and talk."
Stuart waited patiently as his grandfather boiled the tea over the stove and offered him the tea in his favorite mug, which featured a picture of Albert Einstein and his famous theory of relativity. Grandpa Ginsburg's mug had quotes from the poem, "Howl" including "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Minkus looked through the boxes of old photographs that his grandfather had collected over the years of the patrons of Café Hey. He called those photos his windows, because they "captured someone at sometime doing something and to them it was important. So it was important to me too." Ginsburg held up a photograph of a man with wild black curly hair and wearing a checked sports jacket, a pretty brunette woman in an A-Line loud print mini-dress, and a large man with long hair and a beard, wearing a fringe jacket. Ginsburg pointed fondly at the curly haired man. "My nephew, Michael," he said. "You know we went to school for years, close to the same age, same grade, and same last name though different spellings, but it never occurred to us that we were related until his father told me. Oddly enough neither of us was related to the poet, a lot of Ginsburgs running around. See, I got lucky; I left Germany with my Mom and Pop when I was three. I mean sure we lost a couple of siblings and a few other relatives to the Nazis, but at least we made it to the States. It never occurred to me that my oldest brother would eventually find his way to New York himself with this orphan he adopted from Sweden, an orphan who would later end up being my closest friend in school."
Minkus looked closely at the photograph. Under the faces he could see a caption with his grandfather's handwriting, "Michael Ginsberg (beloved nephew), Peggy Olson, Stan Rizzo, October 14, 1966." Ginsburg grinned. "It was a lot of fun when Michael entered the café. We used to love confusing people when he would call me, 'Unk' and I would call him, 'Nephew.' "He pointed at the woman in the photo. "I still remember what that girl, Peggy, said to me, 'Aren't you a bit too cute-er I mean young to be an uncle?'"
Minkus laughed. "What happened to Michael?" he asked.
"He became a big shot copywriter for one of those ad agencies, you know the one that made that 'Teach the World To Sing' thing?" the older man glowered. "I hate them for that. I still can't get that song out of my head." He had a long look as he fingered the image of his nephew. "Poor Michael."
"What happened to him?" Minkus said knowing there was more to the story than him becoming a copywriter.
"Well he went a little funny in the head," Ginsburg admitted. "I guess he thought that the computers they installed in his office were doing some sort of experiments on him turning him into a homosexual or were taking over the world or some such."
"What?" Minkus exclaimed. "That's crazy. Computers are the wave of the future! Do you know how much information can be obtained from only one byte of knowledge?"
Ginsburg held up his hands in defense. He knew that his grandson spent a great deal of time on the Internet, so if anyone would know its benefits it would be Stuart Minkus. "Hey, I'm just telling you what he said," the older man said. "I told you funny in the head remember? Well they took him to the hospital and did things to him, electric shocks, lobotomy. He hasn't been the same since, been in and out many times since then. He was brilliant, not with numbers and technology like you, but he had a gift for words. He was the type that always knew what to say and was brazen enough to say it. But sometimes that brilliance got twisted in his mind and well-the results aren't always good. Sometimes that brilliance can overwhelm someone and they become consumed by it."
"Oh," Stuart said feeling a strange kinship with this relative whom he never met but through his grandfather's words began to understand. "Is that why you think Mother doesn't like me? She thinks that I'm too much like Michael?" It was kind of unnecessary. After all, Minkus obviously harbored no ill feelings towards technology and if what his grandfather said was true, then Michael was adopted. There would be no biological possibilities of mental illness inherited between them. But then again there were studies that indicated mental illness was an effect of background, nurture rather than nature.
"Michael and well like me," Ginsburg said ruefully to his son. "And your Mother likes you. You two are just on different parts of this vast universe, that's all."
Minkus thumbed through the "windows," hoping to change the subject. He held up a picture of a man dressed in cowboy clothing and a black hat, a woman wearing a black pantsuit and brown hair in a ponytail, and a woman with long blond hair and a red dress. Unlike the earlier picture of Michael and his friends, this was unmarked. "Who were they, Grandpa?" Minkus asked.
"Oh that's Merlin Scoggins, Rosie McGee, and May Clutterbucket," Ginsburg responded. "I called them the Mystery Man, the Observer, and the Singer. Merlin and May were quite good singers, unfortunately not much came of them. I still remember Rosie always writing in her journal. She was just always willing to see the good in people. I never saw anyone with such a genuinely loving soul as her."
"What happened to them?" Minkus asked.
Ginsburg shrugged. "I don't know, they never returned to the café. Sometimes I captured regulars and sometimes I captured people in one moment. They were just one moment. Three people who wanted to be well known, but for some reason or another, it never happened for them. Occasionally, I would see if I could find a book by Rosie or an album by Merlin or May and always came up short. Merlin released one 45 before he came to the café and that was it. Probably the types who wanted to take over the world, but listened when people told them that they were weird. So they just gave up."
Minkus bristled at the point his grandfather was trying to make. "You really think I could take over the world, Grandpa?"
Ginsburg gave his grandson a tight embrace across the shoulders. "If anyone can, son, it would be you."
"So someone became overwhelmed by his brilliance," Minkus indicated the picture of his second cousin, Michael and then nodded at the picture of Merlin, May, and Rosie. "And others decided not to listen to their brilliance and possibly fell into mediocrity. Which one am I?"
Ginsburg put his hand on the young boy's shoulders. "You are whichever one you want to be, one, the other, both, or neither." Minkus shook his head. Sometimes his grandfather was hard even for him to understand.
Minkus looked closely at Rosie and May. "They are very beautiful, but Rosie reminds me of someone. I can't figure out who." He looked closer trying to find some recognition, but still couldn't figure it out. "Never mind."
Minkus worked on his homework while his grandfather listened giving advice and his guesses at the answer. Occasionally he would ask a brain teaser question. "A man is standing between two doors and one leads to certain death and the other leads to a castle of riches. Unfortunately one door tells the truth and the other always lies. Door A says that Door B would say that Door A leads to the castle."
"Door B leads to the castle and Door A leads to certain death," Minkus answered without even looking up. "If Door B is telling the truth, Door A wouldn't be. But if Door A is telling the truth then Door B wouldn't be so the only way that makes sense is for Door B to lead to the castle."
Ginsburg nodded approvingly at his grandson, "Aces, pure aces."
Grandfather and grandson looked up to the sound of a key turning and the door opening. A woman with dirty blond hair, the same color as her son's appeared. She was dressed in a pair of black slacks and a white top under a black blazer. "Stuart, it's time for you to come home for dinner," she said. "You've bothered your grandfather long enough."
Stuart gathered his books and stood. "Oh it's no bother, Nonnie," Ginsburg encouraged. "I'll make him dinner and he could stay a little longer."
Stuart Minkus' mother rolled her eyes. "Pop, for at least the hundredth time, it's Nancy, not Nonnie," she corrected.
"-You're still my little Nonnie," Ginsburg said clearly egging on his daughter.
Nancy held her hand forward motioning her son to follow her. "Stuart, come on. It's a school night and you've got homework to do."
"I've already finished it," Minkus replied.
"Of course you did," Nancy said confused by her son. "Just come on, you've taken enough time here. Me and your father want you to come home now."
"It's your father and I," Minkus corrected. "I is the proper form when using a first person subject." Upon his mother's narrow stare, Minkus silenced himself.
Nancy snapped her fingers. "Stuart, I don't want to have to tell you again!"
Minkus stepped forward to stand next to his mother. "Good-bye, Grandpa," he said.
"Good-bye, Little Man," Ginsburg waved.
"Stuart stand outside while I talk to your grandfather alright," Nancy said. Minkus shrugged and then waited outside on the porch while he listened in on his mother and grandfather's conversation.
"Please do not encourage my son to be rude to us," Nancy said chastising her father like he was a small child.
"He wasn't being rude," Ginsburg objected. "He just said that he had already finished his homework and he did. I don't think he meant anything by the "me/I" thing. He was just trying to be helpful. You don't even have to look at the homework; I know it's going to be all As."
"Of course it will be all A's," Nancy said as if that were a terrible thing. "All that boy does is study."
"You know, Nonnie most parents would think that was a good thing," Ginsburg teased his daughter.
"Nancy," Nancy corrected. "It's not just that he gets A's, in school. It's that's all he does. You know he quit the Warriors Basketball Team."
"He said something about it," Ginsburg said. "It was a waste of time." It was, Stuart thought silently agreeing with his grandfather.
"Well his father is disappointed in him about that and so am I," Nancy Minkus remarked. "There's more to school than just books. There's friends, parties, get togethers. I don't want Stuart to spend all of his youth holed up in his room! He should have friends like that nice Matthews boy or that Hunter boy." Minkus groaned. The terms "nice" and "Cory Matthews and Shawn Hunter" were oxymorons. (Well some kind of morons considering it was Cory and Shawn that he was thinking about).
"If those kids don't get along with him then why should Stuart be friends with them?" Ginsburg objected.
"He's never even tried," Nancy corrected her father. "And I think that you're encouraging his anti-social behavior."
"I beg your pardon young lady," Ginsburg argued.
"I don't think that Stuart should spend so much time here with you," Nancy said. "I don't want him coming here after school anymore."
"You don't or Tom doesn't?" Ginsburg asked. He never got along with his son-in-law, Tom Minkus and now found further reasons not to.
"We both don't," Nancy Minkus defended her husband and herself. "Stuart is our son, Pop not yours. We know what's best for him and best for him is not spending his youth holed up in his room with his books and his computer and with an adult who tells him that it's alright to do so."
"I'm your father dammit," Ginsburg argued.
"Phillip was more my father than you ever were," Nancy shot back referring to her stepfather.
Nancy opened the screen door and motioned her son forward to follow her. Minkus looked dejectedly at his grandfather, but Ginsburg smiled and shrugged like "what can you do."
While Minkus didn't go to his grandfather every day, he didn't stop visiting him completely. He was just more circumspect about it, visiting while his parents weren't home and making sure that he came home before they did. As always, Grandpa Ginsburg was delighted to see his beloved grandson. Minkus told his grandfather about the recent production of Hamlet, in which he took the advice from a dramatic interpretation in which Elizabethan England sounded like American Southern. "Makes sense to me," Ginsburg encouraged. "Who wants to always see Hamlet portrayed the same way as some British fellow?" He opened a cigar box and took out some green leaves. "I'm sure it was a success."
"Not quite it was ruined by a couple of spear carriers," Minkus said sarcastically. "A certain curly haired spear carrier."
"Let me guess that Matthews boy," Ginsburg prompted as he rolled the leaves inside white paper. "Possibly followed by a prank by the Hunter boy."
"Who else?" Minkus glowered. "I don't understand what the problems are with them."
"I get the feeling they don't understand what the problem is with you," Ginsburg playfully suggested. "Sometimes there are people who just don't get along, but you later find that you have more in common than you thought you would." He then struck a match and lit his incense burner. He waved the smoke with his hands letting it move towards the direction where the grandfather and grandson were seated. Minkus could smell the powerful incense in his direction. It almost made him gag over how strong it was.
"I would have something in common with Cory Matthews and Shawn Hunter?" Minkus asked his grandfather in shock. It was almost as though the old man was challenging the theory of relativity. "What can I possibly have in common with those incompetent brainless idlers?"
"That's how you see them," Ginsburg shrugged. "Keep in mind they see you as a sycophantic dull nerd."
"I am not," Minkus objected amid his grandfather's laugh.
"I'm just teasing you my boy," Ginsburg said as he lit the joint and smoked it. "If you keep seeing each other without really listening then you will never get beyond what you see. Take your grandmother and I, we had some good years together…"
"Grandpa you were divorced most of the time," Minkus reminded the elderly man.
"Well I didn't say that the good years were consecutive now did I?" Ginsburg answered. "True we wanted different things, she wanted a house with the picket fence in the suburbs. I wanted to be at the center of it all meeting the best artists, thinkers, and doers. But we still had those good years to fall back on and we had our little Nonnie to remind us that we had something great." He hesitated before he continued. "Eventually maybe not even now, you will find that you have more in common with Cory Matthews and Shawn Hunter than you think you do."
Minkus thought about it, but he looked at his grandfather's activities. "Grandfather you know that you shouldn't be smoking marijuana. The New England Medical Journal states that it slows your reaction time and causes detrimental effects to your health."
"Yes son," Ginsburg said. "But according to the American Medical Association research it is also beneficial to curing glaucoma and helps relax during chemotherapy."
"Do you have glaucoma?" Minkus asked his grandfather.
Ginsburg shrugged. "Well, I'm…trying to prevent it." Minkus shook his head figuring that he didn't want to continue arguing this point. Ginsburg continued to smoke silently as he thought. "Nairobi."
Minkus considered the odd change in subject, but then he grinned playing along thinking of a city that started with "I". "Istanbul."
"Lisbon," Ginsburg said.
"New York City," Minkus answered.
"Ypres."
"Stockholm."
"Madrid."
"Denver."
"Rome."
"Edinburgh."
"Honolulu. Try to top that one," Ginsburg taunted.
Minkus thought for a minute for a city that started with "u." "Ur!" He said triumphantly. "The rules never stated that the city still had to be in existence."
"I'll allow it," Ginsburg said. Suddenly, the door opened. Ginsburg quickly doused the joint while Minkus unthinkingly threw the cigar box under the table. "Nancy, Tom," Ginsburg greeted his daughter and son-in-law.
"Malachi," Tom said coldly greeting his father-in-law. Tom Minkus was a tall man with hair darker than his wife's. He peered at Ginsburg through his glasses as though he were a fly at a picnic.
"Stuart I thought that we discussed this," Nancy said. "We didn't want you coming over to your grandfather's after school."
"We were just talking," Minkus said. "Besides you told me that you wanted me to get out of the house. Technically, I am."
"Don't smart mouth your mother, Stuart," Tom warned his son. " You deliberately disobeyed us. Now come on before we ground you further." Minkus gathered his books and followed his parents when his mother pointed at her son's arithmetic book. "What's that?" she said.
"What?" Minkus asked looking down. Nancy reached over and brushed off the green spots and examined it. "Grass," she said showing her husband letting him take a close look. "You have been encouraging our son to smoke marijuana?"
"No," Minkus objected.
"It's mine," Ginsburg said. "Stuart doesn't have any part of it."
"But you still smoke in front of him," Tom said. "Not exactly a stable influence."
"The two of you need to come to our house where we will have a little talk," Nancy said shepherding her son and her father out the door.
Stuart listened through his bedroom door trying to ignore the raised voices in the living room. He tried to keep his mind on the computer and what he was watching on the Internet, but the web page held no interest for him. Instead the heated argument downstairs was taking precedence.
"It was an honest mistake," Ginsburg said. "Some of it spilled onto his textbook and I only smoked in front of him this one time. I certainly would never ask him to light up with me!"
"It's not just about the joint, Dad," Nancy said. "It's about everything. Stuart deceived us by coming to see you. He doesn't have any friends. He ruined that play!"
"From what I understand the spear carriers did their part," Ginsburg argued.
"Before that he gave the worst performance anyone had ever seen," Tom said.
"I almost couldn't show my face in public again," Nancy agreed.
Well that would have been quite an achievement, Minkus thought. His parents almost never showed up for anything that their son did in school. Maybe they thought because he had the lead in the school play, it was something to brag about.
"He was trying something new, something that was different," Ginsburg said.
Nancy said. "We think it's about time that we took Stuart to see a therapist."
"For being a creative genius," Ginsburg said. "I would hate to think what Mozart or Picasso would have been like if they were your children."
"We aren't talking about Mozart and Picasso," Tom said testily. "We are talking about Stuart."
"You don't understand him," Ginsburg said. "You never did."
"Don't tell us what we don't understand, Pop," Nancy argued. "All we know is that our son is not normal and we need to fix that and we need for him to spend less time with you." She paused. "I think it's time for you to move."
Minkus felt ill at the thought of Grandpa Ginsburg leaving. "No," he mouthed quietly but he continued to listen.
"He's my grandson," Ginsburg argued. "You can't keep me from him."
"He's our son, Malachi and we will," Tom said determined.
"I came here to be a part of that boy's life," Ginsburg said.
"Well that's great that you want to be a part of his life, Dad," Nancy's voice dripped with sarcasm. "Because you sure as hell didn't want to be a part of mine!"
There was a long silence. Stuart waited for the words to continue. When it seemed several minutes passed, he heard his grandfather say slowly. "I'm sorry, Nonnie er Nancy. I'm sorry that your mother and I married too young. I'm sorry that we had a child before we were ready for it. 17 is no age to marry let alone have a baby. I'm sorry that I moved to the Village and opened the café rather than stay with your mother and be the happy 'Father Knows Best' dad that she wanted me to be. I'm sorry that we couldn't be in the same room without biting each other's heads off and that I wasn't there for you as much as I should have been. I'm sorry for all of that. But I don't think that Stuart has to pay for the things that I did and the things that you still blame me for. I missed out on you, and I regret that. Don't ask me to miss out on Stuart because you are still angry with me."
"It's too late for that, Pop," Nancy said hoarsely. Even though he couldn't see her, Stuart knew that his mother had been crying. "You can't make up for any of it. We want you to leave and we want Stuart to be normal." Her voice wavered. "Please, dad, I don't want him to end up like Michael, in an asylum or you, so caught up in your thoughts and incapable of making any sort of commitment."
"Neither do I, Nonnie," Ginsburg said. "I love that boy."
Nancy for once did not object to her original birth name. "Then if you do love him, you will leave."
A few days later, Stuart watched as his grandfather handed his parents the house keys. Minkus looked downward as his grandfather patted him on the head. "Don't worry, Little Man. It was getting old here anyway. I've got an urge to move on."
"But I'm going to miss you," Minkus said laying his emotions out. His eyes watered.
Ginsburg tilted the boy's chin up. "Hey none of that. You and I are geniuses. Geniuses rely on logic remember? Logic says that it's time for me to go and it's time for you to accept that."
"I will miss you," Minkus said.
"I will miss you too, Little Man," Ginsburg said. The two hugged until his grandfather pulled free from him and headed for his son-in-law's car. Tom was going to drive Ginsburg to the bus station.
"You may not understand it but we are doing this for your own good," Nancy said to her son. "It will build your character."
In the annals of great unanswered questions that thinkers have pondered for centuries such as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound or why hot dogs come in packages of 10 while hot dog buns come in packages of 8, Stuart Minkus could add this one: Why do parents seem to think that the worst things that a child could go through are always for their own good? Where were all the good character building experiences? Minkus could not understand how something that ripped his heart out and made him feel this terrible could ever be for his own good.
As the car pulled away, Minkus could feel his body become cold. This is what happens when someone you love leaves you. They always disappoint you. The 11-year-old vowed that he would never feel that strongly for someone ever again. He never wanted it to hurt as much as it did then.
"You can finally be normal," Nancy said to him. Minkus didn't respond but looked directly at her. He still felt the coldness pushing all feelings of love aside. He was never going to be hurt again.
The next day at school Mr. Feeny talked about the scuba diving club. At first Minkus didn't want to be any part of it, but he overheard Cory and Shawn make their usual lame jokes. Cory saying something about scuba standing in for dooba and Shawn saying that the acronym stood for "Something's Creepy Under Boat…Andy."
Mr. Feeny turned to the young genius. "Take it away Mr. Minkus."
Minkus considered what his grandfather meant to him and how much it hurt when he left. He also remembered what his mother said, You can finally be normal. If normal is what it took, then maybe he should give it a try.
"No," Minkus said. "I don't want to know everything. I want to be one of the normal guys. I want to be stupid. I'm going with dooba." The others laughed at his comment.
Feeny looked confused. "Well if Mr. Minkus doesn't know…"
Minkus drummed his fingers on the table. Okay he would take the bait. "Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus."
"Thank you, Mr. Minkus," Mr. Feeny said.
"I hate myself," Minkus said knowing that he was referring to more than just the answer that he gave.
"You're not alone," Shawn said and in Stuart Minkus' mind he could hear his mother and father saying that as well. He pushed that thought away feeling his body and his mind become cold and turn colder.