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!”

                moments!