This will likely be the last “personal” post I put up on Random Fate, since I’m changing directions for this weblog, but I needed to write one final commentary on the human condition here.

When I was in high school, I was in a class called “Creative Writing” that was restricted to those students who had been classified as “gifted”. They gave the same test to the students who were believed to be “gifted” as to those who were suspected of being “retarded” (to use the terminology of those pre-PC days of 27 years ago).

I took the test, which involved both putting pegs into the appropriate holes (I briefly considered trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole, but since the person giving the test seemed to have no sense of humor, even at 10 years old I was wise enough to decide better of it) along with being given a set of drawings on cards that I was supposed to arrange into a story.

To this day, I do not know if I got those drawings in the “right” order for a coherent story; my memory is very fuzzy regarding the details. I must have, because I was put in the “gifted and talented” classes, such as they were in Mississippi in the 1970s. Even then the state barely funded education, much less any programs that went outside the norm, gifted or behind the norm.

I actually had to ask to be given the tests to determine if I was “gifted”. Somehow, I had not been noticed, and I complained to my parents when I was put in a class that I was completely bored in while some of the classmates I was good friends with had been put in the “gifted” class.

After I took the tests, it was surprising how many apologies were offered to my parents. Apparently, I had scored very well on all the standardized tests up until then, but no one had noticed.

My parents told me that I had been determined to have an IQ of 165.

The IQ tests of the time were designed to have a “normal” of 100.

Yet no one had noticed.

I’m still trying to determine if my parents did me a favor or not in telling me the whole truth at the time.

How does a child of 10 handle this kind of information, both about himself, and about the teachers who are supposed to be his guides yet who failed to notice such an obvious deviation that was in the realm of their responsibility to address?

I had a difficult time with it.

Even now, I try to cope with the consequences of both the knowledge of an imperfect measurement, and with the difficulties I have in communicating with people in general.

Occasionally, I meet others with whom I share some smaller or larger part of my history, and I continually wonder “what if?”

What if I had met them at a different time?

What if I had met them in different circumstances?

As with all “what if?” questions, however, there is no real answer.

One might as well ask, “What if the world were a different place?”

It the world were a different place, things would be different, would they not?

No demonstration needed, this is a tautology.

Somehow, we all rebel against the world and still cry, “Why? Why is it this way?”

There is no answer; the universe only offers silence in reply.

This is yet another small tragedy that rings large in our individual lives, but is insignificant in comparison to the blood and death that still exists on a large scale, even in these “enlightened” times.

Plus la change, plus le meme chose.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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