The Moments - Chapter 8: Spontaneous Emotional Response

               One of my favorite movies from the 1980s is “Short Circuit” (I also love its sequel, aptly named “Short Circuit 2”).  If you’ve never seen it, shame on you.  This is the classic story of a Cold War defense robot that comes to life when struck by lightning.  The original film is, basically, the robot’s quest to avoid being destroyed by the defense contractors who built him and to convince his creator that he is, in fact, alive.  In the scene in which Number 5, the robot, confronts his creator, Newton Crosby (played by Steve Gutenberg), in an attempt to prove his near-humanity, Crosby makes statements and asks questions seeking to determine the human quality of his responses.  What ends up convincing him is Number 5’s response to a joke.  Crosby thinks he got the joke wrong but Number 5 still “gets it” and laughs hysterically (and robotically) after he thinks about the punch line for a few seconds.  When this occurs, Crosby declares his belief that Number 5 is alive on the basis of “spontaneous emotional response.”  Indeed, it seems to be a pretty exclusively human trait.  Watching Joey’s emotional responses grow and evolve has given me a deeper view of the reality of this concept.

               Ever since Joey could say a handful of words and focus on what he saw on a television, he has enjoyed watching Ernest P. Worrell (my boy has good taste in entertainment!).  He frequently requests it, too.  In the days when Joey usually only spoke a word or two at random at a time, he would simply plead “Ernest!  Ernest!” – as if he was calling out to an old friend.  When those times came, we would put a DVD of Ernest commercials or his old Saturday morning kids’ show in to play and have a ball (still do).  As with most children in the first year or two of life, Joey’s responses to many things he saw and heard were the mimicry of my responses.  If I laughed at Ernest, Joey would laugh at him.  However, one morning in the summer or fall of last year, as I was doing something else, I heard one of Ernest’s commercials begin and noticed Joey glued to the TV.  Joey’s gaze at the screen didn’t break.  It was the Pine State Ice Cream commercial in which Ernest built Vern a tall ice cream cone with one scoop of each flavor of ice cream that he had in front of him all while singing a variation of “Happy Birthday.”  Extending his arm straight ahead and out of view, Ernest hands the ice cream cone to Vern but quickly retrieves the empty cone which had lost all its scoops because Ernest piled it too high.  With a glance at the cone and a glance at Vern, he begins singing and scooping again and the commercial ends.  On this particular occasion, it amazed/amused/stopped me a bit to notice that when the ice cream fell off the cone and Ernest pulled the cone back, Joey totally got the joke and began to laugh purely based on his own understanding of what he had seen and heard.  This was a small example of spontaneous emotional response.  But, it also gave me pause to wonder how we actually develop the ability to not only understand a joke but understand it to the point of having a real reflexive reaction to it.  [This may also be the part where some of you think it’s good that Joey never really needed me to determine what’s funny for him.] 

               Spontaneous emotional response took a deeper form to me as Joey’s conversational skills continued to develop and he would say, or simply repeat, things to me in a manner that showed real understanding.  The simplest and best example of this is the statement “I love you.”  As I have written before, the first time Joey ever repeated that line to me was during our evening routine when I was drying him off from a bath and getting him ready for bed.  While it thrilled me and touched my heart to hear him say “I love you,” I also knew that it was primarily a simple repeating of what I had just said to him.  After that, yes, I always listened for him to say “I love you” back to me.  Sometimes he did, and sometimes he didn’t.  But there came a time when I knew in my mind and soul “he gets it,” and it was one of the many moments that reminded me that he and I are an inseparable team.  One afternoon early this year, we went to Kroger to do the “major shopping” (you know, when you fill up the whole buggy and make friends with the person who checks you out because you’re at the register for so long).  Joey was being extra affectionate that day.  I would stop in the middle of an aisle to look for something and he would reach up, not to seek an exit from his seat in the cart, but to pull me down for a hug.  He did that at least half a dozen times over the course of our shopping trip.  It was great!  We’d talk about what Joey was pointing to in the store and he would observe other people around us.  On one aisle, we had stopped for a moment and he pulled me in for a hug.  I said “I love you, son,” and with a little tilt of his head and a different look in his eyes than normal, he smiled and said “I love you.”  Though he had repeated it and said it at random before, I knew at that moment “He gets it!  It’s not just a line he repeats now.”  I nearly cried for a second.  But Joey and I both knew we had to finish the shopping.  Maybe I was the one experiencing spontaneous emotional response here, but I think it was one of those times where knowing his Daddy loves him, and really internalizing it, let Joey experience it too.
               As much as I love the “Short Circuit” movies (and, again, if you haven’t seen them, you must), they got one point a little bit wrong.  When Number 5 exhibited spontaneous emotional response, Newton Crosby knew and believed that he was alive.  But, in reality, when I see little Joey Grimes display spontaneous emotional response – especially when he says “I love you, Daddy” – that’s when he makes me believe that I am really alive.  And, thanks to Joey, I am more alive every day.  Knowhutimean?