Loser

“His legs—his legs are going so fast! He thinks that if they go any faster he might begin to fly. A white car is coming from behind. He races the car. He is surprised that it passes him. Surprised but not unhappy. He is too free to be unhappy. He waves at the white car. He stops and looks for someone to laugh with and celebrate with. He sees no one, so he laughs and celebrates with himself. He stomps up and down on the sidewalk as if it’s a puddle.”

Donald’s first day out of the house begins ecstatically as he runs along the sidewalk simply for the joy of it. As he learns about the big world outside, everything is a cause for wonderment. His natural happiness overcomes all disappointments and will carry him forward in the face of failures to come.

“Burping, growing, throwing, running—everything is a race. There are winners everywhere. I win! I win! I win! The sidewalks. The backyards. The alleyways. The playgrounds. Winners. Winners. Except for Zinkoff. Zinkoff never wins. But Zinkoff doesn’t notice. Neither do the other pups. Not yet.”

Donald, too happy to care that he’s not very competitive, doesn’t worry about it. But children need to show some wins or the other kids will begin to look down on them. They form a natural pecking order, and the boy at the bottom will be shunned. This will haunt Donald in the future.

“The cubbies, as the classroom seating soon will be, are in alphabetical order. She goes straight to the last cubbyhole and inserts the giraffe. The space is not deep enough to hold it all. It looks as if a baby giraffe is napping in there. The thought comes to her that Donald Zinkoff, in more ways than cubbyholes, will always be easy to find.”

Donald, with his giraffe hat and loud voice and the way he at first jumps up to attention when he speaks, wears his eccentricities like a suit of clothes. Miss Meeks already knows he’ll be an oddball kid with annoying habits. She also knows that he’s not a mean or angry child, but that he may cause trouble even if he doesn’t intend to.

“‘Just imagine how much you can learn in two thousand one hundred and sixty days!’ She pauses to let them imagine. ‘Two thousand one hundred and sixty adventures. Two thousand one hundred and sixty opportunities to become whatever you want to become. This is what you’ve been waiting six years for. This is the day it begins.’”

Miss Meeks’s opening speech to her new first grade students is meant to inspire them about the grand project that lies ahead: their 12 years of public schooling. Hers is a vision of possibilities. It inspires Donald so much that he leaps up for joy and knocks over his desk.

“Recess turns out to be just another name for life as he has always known it. Only shorter. His first recess lasted six years. This one is fifteen minutes. He means to make the most of it.”

Donald loves life and loves to play. He displays a natural optimism that takes any situation and turns it into an adventure. His enthusiasm would inspire others except that he’s so eccentric about it that the other kids begin to shun him.

“He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts. This makes him feel close to the unfallen stars left in the sky.”

Like most young children, Donald holds strange beliefs about life. His story about stars ends happily each time his mother awards him one for a good day. His parents’ love and support gives him room to imagine and dream wonderful possibilities about the world around him.

“Here is the surprise: Every day is like the first day to Zinkoff. Things keep happening that rekindle the excitement of the first day. Learning to read his first two-syllable word. Making a shoe-box scene about the Pilgrims. Counting to five in Spanish. Learning about water and ants and tooth decay. His first fire drill. Making new friends.”

Donald’s enthusiasm is boundless. He finds good things everywhere. He’s a small boy who wanders through life breathless with awe.

“When Miss Meeks passes Zinkoff on to second grade, she writes on the back of his final report card: ‘Donald sometimes has a problem with self-control, and I wish he were neater, but he is so good-natured. That son of yours is one happy child! And he certainly does love school!’”

Donald’s enthusiasm is charming, but his eccentric habits, and especially his endless laughter, frustrates his elders. He’s hard to punish because he’s so good-natured and believes everything is simply an adventure. Miss Meeks sends him on to the next teacher with mixed emotions.

“Zinkoff was born with an upside-down valve in his stomach. This causes him to throw up several times a week. To Zinkoff, throwing up is almost as normal as breathing.”

One of Donald’s not-so-charming habits is vomiting. It’s not his fault—it’s a medical condition—but it goes on the list of eccentricities that stress out the people around him. Between laughing, talking too loudly, wandering off, and vomiting, Donald can be a handful despite his cheerful nature.

“Throughout the game, and even at the end, he has not thought about the score. Apparently, losing has made Robert very unhappy. It shows on his face. It shows in the way he’s kicking at the turf. Zinkoff looks around. Other Titans are kicking turf or stomping their feet or pounding their thighs with their fists. Every Titan wears a sour puss.”

Donald doesn’t care about winning or losing, but his teammates go through contortions of grief, in part to show their parents how serious they are about victory. Donald is happy to act aggrieved, too, but that only gets him into trouble with his parents, and his heart isn’t really in it. He doesn’t grasp that, to many participants, the point of organized sports isn’t to have fun but to win or be miserable.

“Zinkoff is an all-purpose laugher. Not only do funny things make him laugh, but nearly anything that makes him feel good might also make him laugh. In fact, sometimes bad things make him laugh. He laughs as naturally as he breathes.”

One of Donald’s most annoying traits—his uncontrollable mirth—comes from his great joy at being alive. In fact, many of his worst habits arise out of cheerful enthusiasm. It simply doesn’t occur to him that anyone would be troubled by laugh-out-loud joy.

“There is a minute or two during which he has a strange thought. Actually he doesn’t really have the thought. His mind is trying to catch the thought as a cat tries to catch a shadow. The thought, if he could catch it, would go something like this: Behind the front doors of houses incredible, impossible things are happening, and as soon as you lift the mail flapper they all disappear and all you see is an ordinary living room.”

Donald plays mailman with his father one Sunday, delivering make-believe mail to local residents. His creative mind, always alert for possibilities, imagines wonders hidden in the nearby homes. He creates adventures out of thin air.

“To Donald, one of the best things about being a mailman is that you have to deliver the mail in spite of snow, rain, hail and, for all he knows, tidal waves and tornadoes. In fact, it was on a day when he saw his father come home with icicles hanging from his earmuffs that he decided to become a mailman. He watched his father shake the snow and ice from himself, and he said, ‘Wow, Dad! Was it hard?’ He has never forgotten the answer. His father picked an icicle from his hat, stuck it in his mouth like a toothpick and said, ‘Nah. No problem. Piece a cake.’”

His father is his hero, and Donald wants to imitate him. He wants to be a mailman, not because it would give him prestige, as with Andrew’s dad, but because to him it’s a heroic activity that’s friendly and brings greetings to people. Donald is drawn to activities for their heart, not their status.

“He hates waiting more than anything else. To Zinkoff, waiting means basically this: not moving. He hates waiting in lines. He hates waiting for the bathroom to clear out. He hates waiting for answers, for toast to pop up, for bathtubs to fill, for soup to heat, soup to cool, car rides to end. Most of all he hates sleep, the curse of the human race. Every night he protests it, every morning he gets out of it as soon as he can.”

Donald can’t wait for his next adventure. Any delay frustrates him. His enthusiasms are larger than life, and ordinary delays, including the immobile boredom of mere sleep, are more than he can bear.

“Unlike most children, Zinkoff is not afraid of the dark. Outside darkness does not frighten him. His father has told him that the stars are faraway suns, and the thought of all those suns up there gives Zinkoff a warm and cozy feeling at night. Inside, he seems to carry his own sunshine with him—he’s a sunshine bottle—even into the closet, where sometimes he hides from Polly without a twinge of fear.”

Darkness isn’t a problem for Donald, as it can be for most children. He can see the darkness beneath his bed and in the closet, but he can’t see the darkness inside drawers, no matter how quickly he opens them. The only darkness he fears is in the cellar, where dwells the Furnace Monster. Otherwise largely fearless, Donald has yet to confront the other challenges of growing up that may be even worse than the one behind the furnace.

“Little-kid eyes are scoopers. They just scoop up everything they see and swallow it whole, no questions asked. Big-kid eyes are picky. They notice things that the little-kid eyes never bothered with: the way a teacher blows her nose, the way a kid dresses or pronounces a word. Twenty-seven classmates now turn their new big-kid eyes to Zinkoff, and suddenly they see things they haven’t seen before. Zinkoff has always been clumsy, but now they notice. Zinkoff has always been messy and atrocious and too early and giggly and slow and more often than not wrong in his answers. But now they notice.”

Donald has lived his ten years heedless of his goofball mannerisms and how they might affect others. In fourth grade, however, the other kids begin to notice, and some of his more extreme traits bother them. The more competitive among them will see him as annoying and as someone who’s easy to pick on.

“He knows that he could lose a thousand races and his father will never give up on him. He knows that if he ever springs a leak or throws a gasket, his dad will be there with duct tape and chewing gum to patch him up, that no matter how much he rattles and knocks, he’ll always be a honeybug to his dad, never a clunker.”

Donald finally gets noticed in fourth grade by his classmates for his clumsiness and general incompetence. When his extremely slow running loses a relay race that would have secured a championship, his schoolmates begin to call him “Loser.” Donald’s life just got a lot worse, but his father consoles him during a ride in the family clunker. Donald realizes that his dad will always be there for him.

“Loser. The discovery and renaming of Zinkoff is a great convenience to the student body. Zinkoff has been tagged and bagged, and now virtually everything he does can be dumped into the same sack. His sloppy handwriting and artwork, his hapless fluting, his mediocre grades, his clumsiness, his birthmark—everything is seen as an extension of his performance on Field Day, everything is seen as a matter of losing. It is as if he loses a hundred races every day.”

All of Donald’s eccentric habits and mannerisms seem merely odd until he loses an important relay race. From then on, his oddities simply confirm to the other students that he’s a loser. Instead of being an interesting oddball, he plummets to the bottom of the school’s pecking order, and nearly everyone rejects him. He’s been pigeonholed into a bad slot, and he can’t get out.

“He knows what a best friend is. He sees them all over. Best friends are Burt O’Neill and George Undercoffler. Or Ellen Dabney and Ronni Jo Thomas. Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other’s house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other’s parents. You can’t pry them apart. Zinkoff doesn’t have anybody like that. Most of the time he doesn’t think about it. But now and then he does.”

A test booklet asks Fifth-grade Donald to write down the name of his best friend, and he wonders what a best friend would be like. Since Andrew Orwell moved, his friends are casual at best: a kid he plays marbles with, a boy who’s as sloppy as he is, and a girl who always smiles when they cross paths. Apparently he should have a best friend, so he decides to search for one. It’s something he needs, and, as with all his activities, he turns it into a grand adventure.

“He tells her about Field Day and why he isn’t at school. He tells her about his two favorite teachers of all time, Miss Meeks and the Learning Train and Mr. Yalowitz who said, “And the Z shall be first!” He tells her about his giraffe hat and Jabip and Jaboop (she laughs out loud at that) and the giant cookie for Andrew Orwell and Hector Binns and his earwax candle. He tells her about Field Day again and what the clocks said and what Gary Hobin said and he tells her about the goal he scored for the Titans and what happened when he closed the door behind him in the cellar with the Furnace Monster which, heaven help him, he still half believes in. On and on he talks, scooping the fruit out of his life and dropping it into her lap.”

His visit to the old lady with the walker becomes a therapy session, as Donald tells his story and lets go of the old hurts and longtime loneliness. Somehow, the old lady knows what Donald needs, and she listens, nodding and sometimes laughing, as Donald describes all the goofy struggles he has gone through. Her acceptance of him as a person gives him room to accept himself.

“‘Donald Zinkoff?’ Zinkoff snaps to. He jumps up, lurches for the principal, catches his foot in the chair of the clarinetist beside him and goes sprawling to the floor. The flute goes clattering. The audience explodes with laughter. He doesn’t blame them. What a goofus! He joins in the laughter. He scrambles after the flute. He picks himself up, takes a bow and resumes his journey to the principal, only to be reminded that it’s the superintendent he needs to see.”

At graduation, Donald is his usual, clumsy self, but now he accepts it, even laughing along with the audience when he falls on his face. His only fear is that no one will cheer for him when he accepts his diploma, but his sister chants his name and pumps her fists, so all is not lost. Donald has graduated—not merely from fifth grade but from his early childhood: He knows that he’s a doofus and that it’s okay.

“[Donald] saw that a kid runs to be found and jumps to be caught. That’s what being a kid is: found, caught. Then [Polly] did something that has never left him. Sitting there in the middle of the street, she reached up to him, not to his father but to him, and his heart went out of him and he picked her up and he carried her home on his shoulders.”

While searching for Claudia, Donald remembers how his sister, Polly, ran away one day, walking an entire mile before she stopped and let her dad and brother retrieve her. He understands that kids run off hoping they’ll be found. Knowing this, he searches for Claudia, with whom he has a connection, hoping to find her before the cold, snowy night claims her.

“Almost every person has the same question: ‘Why?’ What was he doing out there? they want to know. And when his parents tell them why, they turn to him and stare at him funny; then they come over and some sit on the edge of the sofa and some just bend down, and they’re all smiling that half-sad sort of smile his mother had upstairs, and they all seem to have to reach out and touch him. He can’t remember ever being touched so much.”

In his goofy, naïve, and strangely inspired way, Donald tries to rescue his lost friend Claudia and nearly dies in the effort. The community wants to see this weirdly wonderful boy, to touch him, and to know that he’s real. Despite his clumsy ways, Donald’s heart is in the right place, even when it leads him down a dark alley on a failed rescue. His is a spirit to be treasured.