When I was a little boy, my father was a professor of education at West Virginia University. One of his side hustles was performing educational testing, and he tutored his graduate students in how to administer those tests--the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler, as I dimly recall. He paid me a quarter a test. I think that may have been pretty good money for a six-year old in the late ‘50’s. (When I smell a chalkboard, I immediately see a nerdy male graduate student sitting awkwardly in front of me.)
Of course, I wondered how I’d done. My parents told different stories: my dad said I was “brilliant”, but then he said everyone was brilliant. He was an optimist with regard to the intellectual abilities of his fellow person. My mother, not so much. “You did OK,”she’d say, “but I suspect you were bored.”
I was, taking the goddamn thing over and over again. Later, in other contexts, they were unequivocal: “Oh, you three,” she’d say, referring to my siblings as well as me, no doubt in one of her constant attempts to pit us against each other, “are extremely bright.”
With respect to academics, I still thought I was smart. True, at a young age, I checked out when it comes to whole academic fields of endeavor, like math and science. But I still graduated high school with honors. I graduated from Auburn (where talent in the arts and humanities was thin on the ground) with highest honors, a cruel joke on everyone. I went for my MFA in creative writing and was given the editorship of the venerable literary magazine, The Greensboro Review, which 60 years later is still afloat, quite a record. My qualification was that I had the highest college GPA of any incoming student. Everyone else had gone to Cornell, Mount Holyoke, etc. I was a horrible editor, but no one told me.
Then I had my six years teaching at Auburn, where no one disabused me of the notion that I was bright. I should have figured it out, though; I wasn’t publishing much fiction, despite writing reams.
Law school finally brought me down a bit; I finished in only the top 20%, while Nancy finished at number four. Still, top 20% is not nothing. Law was a profession that got you employed in those days; Nancy and I had multiple offers from law firms, another cruel joke on me.
My career has been dutifully chronicled on these pages. I had lots of failures, but I also had a good number of successes. My employers generally liked me and were sad when I left.
I had little victories that bolstered my belief in my intelligence. I was mainly a transactional lawyer; that is, I negotiated agreements, and there were a lot of instances where the lawyer on the other side would say, “Oh, I really like that solution! That’s creative.” And I knew they were being sincere because I hadn’t given up anything.
As I was leaving AIG for Seattle, my boss Robert, jabbing in his fork, said, “Make sure they know that you’re smarter than everyone else.” That stung a little, as he was right; I’d been a little arrogant at AIG. But Robert, you know that you and I were the brightest people in any room there because the bar was so low. Save the accountants and actuaries, OK. But you had to pinch those people to get them to talk.
Finally, leaping forward. Nancy gave birth to a tiny human, Kate, who showed up a month early; she’a always been in a hurry. I missed the early signs that she was really smart—or, never having been a father before, I probably didn’t know what to look for.
At some point in her middle school years, though, I began to be aware that Nancy was helping her with math that blew right past anything I understood. Algebra II, Geometry, Trig, Calculus, and Statistics. I had no idea what any of that stuff meant, but Nancy, like me an English major in college, could help her every night. If she couldn’t help Kate immediately, she said, “Let me Google that,” and then she’d come back and explain to Kate what neither of them had been getting. And likewise with biology and physics. Physics!
I was so embarrassed. I realized something, a thing that became more obvious year by year: Kate and Nancy are really smart. REALLY smart. And, yes, I am actually pretty stupid.
Then there’s the parenting. Nancy would make a decision about what Kate might be allowed to do, and I might have disagreed. For instance, when she was 17, Kate wanted to drive with two friends up to Hurricane Ridge to go hiking. I said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
Nancy asked why, and I provided some commentary about a long drive past Port Angeles, they’re young, bears and vicious mountain goats, etc.
Nancy answered, “Well, I think she’s going to need to make a drive like that with friends sometime. I was doing that at her age.” I paused to remember how at 17 I was flying up and down I-95 in Ft. Lauderdale by myself to baseball games. Also, she continued, the young man was a safe driver and an experienced hiker. The young woman was the embodiment of commonsense. “If something happens, she’ll have people to help out.”
That conversation was typical. I’d have some knee-jerk reaction, and Nancy would have a considered, well-thought out, conscious view of the entire context and likely outcome of the experience. I was always wrong.
My face burns and I look down at my laptop when I think about it. There are little hints. The Plants, Nancy’s family, are really smart. Nancy’s father was a law professor at Michigan for about a millenia, where he was universally beloved. I saw him teach once, when he was visiting at LSU: classroom magic, and he was about 70.
Her sister Peggy, who died recently so that we are all wretched, had an MBA and ran nonprofits in the academic and commercial world. It’s hard to describe her intelligence to do it justice: She was clever, street-smart, wise, self-aware, which is rare, and just about the funniest person I knew. And she has the Plant family emotional intelligence; she understood precisely how to make me feel welcome. We were emailing a week before she died.
Their brother Mark has a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton, has held many difficult jobs, including a long stint at the International Monetary Fund. He quit being an economist to be, at the IMF’s request, head of Human Resources. He’s an economist and he can also do that?
Also, everyone loves him. He gives himself birthday parties in France where people literally cry over how much they love him. That’s emotional intelligence, which Nancy and Kate also have and which I utterly lack.
It has finally dawned on me. My family is not that bright. Well, save my brother, who was literally a rocket scientist with Hughes Aircraft and Texas Instruments. One of his projects was to build a filter to screen out the light from other stars shining on the star they were trying to figure out the brightness of. See, I can’t even explain it. He got all the brains of the family. My apologies to my sister, who doesn’t read this, but she’s as sloppy a thinker as I am.
I understand so little. When I have to respond to someone in some way, I always ask Nancy if what I’m going to say is appropriate. It kind of brings you down, after your parents spent all that time telling you how smart you are. And I really didn’t get it till maybe 10 years ago. I’m so stupid that I didn’t realize how stupid I was.
At least Kate got Nancy’s brains. It would have been difficult to watch her stumble through and realize, oh fuck, this is MY fault.
Once I realized how smart they are, my life really changed. Suddenly every area of human endeavor in which I’ve come up short nags at me like a torn fingernail. Nancy gave up practicing law and reinvented herself as a grant writer, then morphed back into working as a lawyer for nonprofits. I sit and read all day.
Kate’s math homework from Smith is just an embarrassment; I hear her listening to a lecture the words of which are meaningless to me. She got an A in her mandatory First Year’s class, a seminar on Syria, taught by an internationally-recognized expert. He wrote her a short note saying how much he enjoyed having her in the class and wishing her success in Ireland next semester.
I’m embarrassed for my life. Clothes don’t even fit me, and all of my physical ills have rendered me elderly, while Kate and Nancy go off on seven mile hikes which I simply am incapable of joining. Nancy and Kate are sober; it’s a struggle for me to wait till 5 to have a drink.
I’ve simply come up short, come a cropper, left to make the best of a bad job. My mother once said of her own life that there were more doors closing than opening, and now I know what she meant, except most got slammed shut a long time ago. Given how mediocre I am, many never opened to begin with.
All that’s left is to scrabble together what emotional comfort that one can find. Yeats wrote, in “Among Schoolchildren”, about having become a “sixty-year old smiling public man”: “Better to smile on all that smile and show/There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.” It sounds nice. Maybe I can come to live it.
Comentarios