You wouldn’t know it from the TV ads but the Optimal Optimus was a good listener.
Almost everyday the boy spent hours alone with his extruded companion. There were things he needed to talk about, and that included the fact that he wasn’t nearly the boy everybody wanted him to be.
For a time their chats went only in one direction, until the boy started to pretend Optimal was talking back to him. He invented a voice he thought Opt would use if he had a voice. Eventually the boy forgot he was talking to himself.
Neither the transformer or the boy realized it, but at a certain point the communications between them made an extraordinary leap. Optimal Optimus had appropriated the child’s vocal tract and began to formulate and express his own thoughts. He wanted only to help.
He helped the boy visualize how to dive onto the merry-go-round thing on the playground and how to side-step into a grouch to keep his Schwinn upright.
He taught him about making lists of pros and cons (yes to Cub Scouts, no to Boy Scouts).
He helped him lead little kids to aquatics camp and later prepared him for the driving instructor who trapped him a midtown gridlock.
They played catch-up with advanced-placement courses.
The one area where Opt couldn’t help had to do with the birds and the bees. He simply had no idea what a gland is or what it is capable of doing.
The night before the boy went off to college, Opt articulated what both of them knew — the kid was ready to face life on his own. As they were taking their leave the young man asked one final favor.
His mother and father were rigid, irrational, prone to questionable judgment. He wondered if Opt would take them aside and give them a few pointers.
By the time the boy graduated from college, his parents were so much savvier than they had been when they dropped him off at his freshman dorm, four years earlier.
