Not all abuse is physical. Some is the result of psychological warfare. For 42 years, I seemed to be receiving coded messages that something was wrong. They came from seemingly likable billboard ads, pop songs and TV comedy skits. The queasiness, t...
From the late 1960s as I finished elementary school, well on into my adulthood, my active mind wrapped around political philosophies, history, sports, space exploration, feminism, urban development, edgy comedy, spiritual ideals, geopolitics and oh yes, sex, though I neglected the self as a reference point for all this.
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My social life was terribly inadequate during my teens and 20s. Though I had some good friendships, there were not nearly enough of them.
It wasn't that others were avoiding me -- the problem was that I came to think of social relations as a chore, whereas deep mental pursuits were fun. Or, perhaps the substitution for genuine fun.
I almost always had just one friend at a time; I never had that social circle a person needs. And there were some stretches when I had no friends; though I had strong, clear visions of my role in the larger world, I neglected my place in the immediate social sphere, as a racing mind kept me overly focused on my internal universe.
I consistently failed to groom well. I didn't see the need for it – I was a quality person, so others will come to me, I figured. During my college years and through most of the decade which followed, even though I was regarded as skilled conversationalist and a pleasant person, I was making the same mistake made by the brilliant, studious but lonely young Claudia Taylor, later to be known as Lady Bird Johnson. Early during her courtship with Lyndon Johnson, the future president said of her habit of wearing bland white shirts every day: "You won't bring the price you're worth."
When I heard that quote during a 1990s public TV documentary series about the presidents, it made me look around at myself, my closet and my more socially well-rounded colleagues.
Yes, even a dishonest, exploitative snake oil selling politician sometimes offers good advice.
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I remember phenomenal amounts of detail. Even from 40 or 50 years ago.
It's my way to recall a mundane sentence read aloud from a textbook during a particular grammar lesson in the 3rd grade, or several specific Jeopardy questions -- during the Art Fleming years.
I even have flash images of things that happened on the block where I lived from birth to when I was two and one-half years old. Those include being wheeled down the sidewalk in a stroller while holding a saltine cracker -- also during that period, I clearly recall being called by name by a doctor who was weighing me on a baby scale!
Whereas everyone knows, "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed," I can recite the entire 60 seconds of dialogue between Buzz Aldrin and Houston during the Apollo 11 Lunar Module's final descent and touchdown 48 years ago.
Not boasting, just establishing how detailed I mean when I talk about my long-term memory prowess.
Only after reconnecting with elementary school classmates via social media in 2011 did I find out that my ability is unusual.
"I'm forgetfulness impaired," I joked when one person from my third-grade class asked how I could remember all these things.
I have given some thought to the idea that it's an inability to forget, rather than an extraordinary skill which explains long term memory so precise it can spook people.
Anyway, the vivid elementary school era recollections are mostly of things nondescript.
One evening over dinner with a sibling in 2007, those little memory anchors to the past became a cruise ship pulling into port, as I was handed a file stuffed with family documents. I had asked for a single legal paper about our parents' divorce 46 years earlier, which my sister said she'd bring to the pizza restaurant. She then flabbergasted me by showing up with a two-foot wide pouch containing legal briefs, child-support filings and counter filings, Mom and Dad's marriage license from 1949 and the divorce degree 12 years later in which the judge found that Mom's allegations "are true." (No law degree is required to know that if my mother said something, true it was.)
A few days later, as I was thumbing through the big file, I experienced that "chickens come home to roost" feeling that only stumbling upon one's old elementary school report cards can bring.
Each school year had a single card with six grading periods in columns, with every subject in rows graded by a handwritten A through... never mind. The cards contained space for brief year-end comments by the teacher summing up how the child had done.
I was well prepared and "a good little citizen," our close-to-retirement First Grade teacher kindly wrote.
Not really wanting to face just how far into the alphabet my grades had ventured, I put the documentation of half my waking childhood away.
