If this narrative seems disorganized blame it on my ADHD. We discovered this when I
was an adult. In the fifties you were just a badly behaved child. What happens to ADHD children when they grow up? They become ADHD adults! My psychiatrist wanted to try Ritalin but in the atmosphere of the late twentieth century, at a time when Adult ADHD was a new concept, he wanted to cover himself by giving me a controlled substance by doing a formal diagnostic questionnaire. It was two pages, front and back, with 25 questions on a side. By then we had been working together for a while. As he went through the questions I didn’t even need to answer as he and I were laughing so hard, so well did every question describe me! When he completed the first side he said, “I can score this now!” When he was done he said that I already had the highest score he had ever seen, so he did not need to go on! I said,
“Come on, Alan, do it for the entertainment value!”
We completed the second part with our sides in stitches from the laughter. My Mother had sent my grade school report cards which she had saved. I brought them into my therapist, Alan’s partner Joyce, a psychologist, who was my therapist. In those days there were 6 six-week terms, and the report card was a folded thin cardboard piece of paper about letter-sized. On the back were six sections in which the teachers all seemed to write their comment in cursive with a fountain pen. Reading the teachers’ comments not only confirmed that diagnosis beyond a shadow of a doubt, but also raised the short hairs on my neck. To think I could have been hated so intensely by so many. I asked Joyce if she recollected what Churchill said about the RAF pilots during the Battle of Britain?
“Never have so many owed so much to so few!”
Of the 2,937 pilots in that battle 544 were killed with the average life expectancy of a pilot four weeks. They killed 2,545 German pilots.
So I paraphrased for Joyce:
“Never have so many teachers hated on kid so much!”
The Avalanche
I’m sitting in the student union at the University of Miami with some friends. They’re
talking about messy dorm rooms. One of the guys nominates me as having the best
(worst?) all time messy room. Well, not long before that I couldn’t get into my own room
because there was so much crap on the floor that the door, which opened inwards,
wouldn’t budge! I had to climb through the window.
I said,
“Nah, I cleaned it up. You can see the other bed now!”
“What other bed?” was the shocked reply. See, the trash started at the edge of the door
and got deeper as it approached the edge of the bed on a gentle incline. The physics of
piles of crap being what they are, the edge of the bed began another sloping pile
climbing up toward the wall. These eventually merged into one smooth 15-foot-long
sloping pile of shoes, clothes, towels, books, sports gear, magazines, and any other item
that had ever come into my possession during those four years! When I shared this with Joyce she ventured that her son was ADHD. When he gets home from school it was like a white tornado entering the house leaving it in disarray in mere moments!