Thank You for All Things

C
ARRY
M
E
H
OME

T
HE
B
OOK OF
B
RIGHT
I
DEAS

H
UMBLE
B
EGINNINGS

We cannot deny
that often
a truth and a lie
have the same
humble beginnings,
intended to keep
someone from harm,
but in the scheme of things
both have the same intensity
to reduce someone to tears.

—
dodinsky
—

T
HAT SKINNY
eleven-year-old boy sitting across the table from me with the wispy dishwater-blond hair and glasses, that’s my twin brother, Milo, short for Myles. He’s got his long nose pointed down where his physics books and sheets scribbled with mathematical equations are neatly lined up at 180-degree angles on his end of the table. This is where Milo is likely to stay until bedtime (even though Mom says we have to study only until four o’clock), mumbling to himself and moving his face closer and closer to his work and getting more and more fidgety, until he’s reaching for his inhaler. Then Mom makes him stop for the day and go to bed.

Milo is “profoundly gifted.” One of those scary-smart geniuses who could have started college while still in diapers. Milo is going to be a physicist one day. His dream is to get a paper on string theory published in the globally renowned journals
Nature
and
Physical Review
and to prove some startling theory in quantum mechanics so he can earn himself a place among the leading geeks in the physics field.

Mom had me tested when she sent Milo, but I know it was for no other reason than that she didn’t want me to feel left out. Same as she had the eye doctor give me a Sponge-Bob SquarePants sticker when Milo got his last eye exam, even though my eyes are as sharp as a hawk’s, and even though I didn’t know who the little character was. We were six when we took that test. Mom hid the results when they came, but it wasn’t hard to figure out where she’d hidden them, since she puts all of her important papers in one place: her file cabinet, in a folder marked
Important Papers.

“Don’t be disappointed,” Mom told me when she found me sitting on my knees alongside the file cabinet, staring down at our scores:
Lucy Marie McGowan—144. Myles Clay McGowan—180.
“You have a photographic memory and you’re an exceptionally creative child. These IQ tests don’t adequately measure either trait. If they did, you’d have scored every bit as high as your brother.” Later that day, she handed me a quote by Albert Einstein that she had jotted on an index card:
Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

Milo and I are homeschooled. Mom says it’s because
we
have special needs and would only fall through the cracks in a public school system. But in reality, it’s because we’d have to go to an inner city school here in Chicago because there’s
no money for a private school for the gifted, and she’s afraid that Milo would get knifed or shot on the playground for being a freak and a geek. She’s also afraid that if people knew just how smart he is, he’d be hounded by the press and doctors and develop mental problems, which would be an easy thing to do, since the experts believe that profoundly gifted kids are more fragile than others (they sure got that one right!). And, of course, I have to be homeschooled if Milo has to be.

Mom agrees that I should become a psychologist when I grow up, and either get into people’s heads and cure what ails them or test and study gifted kids. Not because she has a particular fondness for shrinks—she doesn’t!—but because she believes that kids should be steered in the direction of their gifts, and I happen to be people-smart.

After I convinced Mom that my interest lies in human behavior, she started checking out psychology textbooks from the college library for me: social and personality psychology, cognitive and experimental psychology, abnormal psychology, clinical psychology, you name it. I enjoy the parts of them I can understand, but like Carl Jung said, “Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world.” I know
I
learn more by studying live people. Not that I have many people to study, mind you, because for the most part we live like recluses. So I watch my mother and my grandmother, the people who sit on the stoop downstairs on the rare days we leave the apartment, and sometimes Milo. Undoubtedly, though, studying Milo would be more beneficial if I were going to be a botanist.

When I told Mom that I’d like to become a psychologist (although I’d rather be a figure skater, even if I do have weak ankles and my balance isn’t up to par. And even if I don’t know how to skate, period, much less do a double axel or a triple lutz), she brought me home a little present that I know was meant to show me that she supports my decision. “I know how much you’ve always liked puppets,” she said when I opened the cloth Sigmund Freud finger puppet that came with a little chaise longue. “They have magnets on the back, so you can stick them to your computer tower.”

Milo got upset when I put Sigmund on my index finger and bobbed him in front of his face, asking him if he thought that having an overprotective, overanxious mother was what made him such a sissy. He punched me in the arm for teasing him, but it didn’t hurt, because Milo is even smaller than I am and his fist is only about the size of a walnut.

In all honesty, if I can’t be a figure skater, and if I have to cure people of what ails them, I’d rather be a shaman. My grandmother, Lillian, snuck me a book about a shaman in Africa. I thought it was cool the way he traveled to the underworlds in search of the missing pieces of people’s souls to heal them.

Mom got upset when she found the book tucked under the dirty clothes in my hamper. “Take that book back when you leave, Mother,” she snapped. “And stop filling Lucy’s mind with that crazy crap.” My grandmother scoffed at her, saying, “What a shaman does is every bit as real as the shadow at our feet, our breath in winter.” Unfortunately, there’s no school that gives a degree in Shamanism. And, anyway, where would I set up my practice? I’d probably have to go to a remote village in some Third World country
and risk dying from cholera or dysentery and get paid in dead chickens, not money. That would suck, because being poor sucks.