NOT LIKE OTHER KIDS
Last summer, after serious thought, Toby Rosenberg announced to his friends and family that he was changing his name. "Toby," he felt, was "a little boy's name." Instead, he would be called Karl, like his father before him. His school accepted the switch. His parents had no argument. Toby--now Karl-- was five years old.
And he had a point: regardless of his age, Karl has never been a little boy. At 14 months, he began to read aloud from the posters he viewed from his stroller. It would be another full year before he talked on his own; but once he did, he spoke fluent English and Polish (his mother, Anna, is from Krakow) and several other languages. He trained himself to Write Japanese after studying the label on a bottle. He taught himself the Hebrew alphabet after seeing the characters on a dreidel, a type of toy. Last year, after seeing a book in a museum shop on ancient Egypt, he compiled a dictionary of hieroglyphics. The impression you get when you first meet Karl is that of a bookish teenager, a middle-aged diplomat, and a talkative grandmother trapped together in the body of a first-grader.
"You don't know what its like with Karl" his father says, laughing tiredly. Karl Sr. was once an artist, and is now a website designer. He spends at least an hour every afternoon in the family's one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment drafting sketches and submitting them to his sons critiques. "He stands behind me and tells me to draw things over and over to his specifications," Karl says. If he's not on the Internet, he's here, issuing commands over my shoulder. We just want to encourage his interests and support him any way we can. Nobody in this household is trying to tell him what to do" Which is just as it should be.