I would like to pause for a moment and explain a little bit about how my brain works. Some might say how it doesn’t work. “Oh Hi Brenda!” So am I allowed to do that? Sure you are. It’s your blog you can do whatever you like. See, things like that where I talk to myself and answer my own questions. This has nothing to do with cars. So if you don’t care for nonsense then you may want to skip this chapter.
It all started when I was a little guy in school. They would give all of the announcements over the loud speaker in the morning. My sister Donna was 2 grades ahead of me so we were in the same school. She would come home from school and tell Mom everything that was going on and the upcoming activities. So Mom would ask me about something and I would say, “I didn’t hear anything about that.” She would ask, “Don’t you listen to the announcements?” Well yes I listened but I could only understand parts of the words. In the English language you must be able to hear consonants or else you will not be able to determine what the intended word is. I could never learn another language. I don’t even do well with English. So many words sound the same. Right, might, flight. I did not find out until later in life that the part of my hearing that was missing involved the perception of consonants. For instance for me the song “Guantanamera” sounds like they are singing “Juan bought a camaro.”
In second grade they gave us a hearing test. All of the kids were sitting around a huge desk with head phones on. That already makes me nervous. They would play a sound and you were to write down on your paper what you were hearing. I could not hear anything. Nuthin!! I was too embarrassed to say anything. So put yourself in my shoes. ” Oh pardon me Miss Hampton but I can’t hear nuthin.” All the other kids laughing, “Ha ha old grandpa Jackson can’t hear nuthin”. So I did the only thing I could think of. I tried to copy what the kid sitting next to me was marking down. Now I was not in the habit of looking at other peoples work in the classroom, I could fail just fine all on my own. Just wanted for this nightmare to end. I must not have done very good on the hearing test because they called me back in for a retest. So they came and got me out of class to go down to the principals office. “Oh No!” That usually means something bad. So there I was sitting at the desk with a teacher and the principal. I was scared. Mrs. Metcalf was 8 feet tall. I did my best to fake my way through that one too. I’m sure as I was leaving the room they were saying, ” Can’t quite figure out what it is but something aint right with that boy.”
Now I don’t mean to give the impression that all of my school experiences were negative. One time in grade school we were learning how to write in cursive. The teacher walked by my desk and said, “I believe that is the ugliest hen scratch that I have ever seen!” So It was encouraging to know that I was at least special in some way.
I think my problem all has to do with focus. I was the poster child for attention deficit and they didn’t even know what it was back then. It’s not that I can’t figure out some fairly complex questions. It’s just that I feel more comfortable with questions like, “Has an armadillo ever been run over on a Texas Highway?” I am master of the obvious. I see images differently than most people. For example when the new Batman logo came out a number of years ago I just didn’t get it. All I could see was an open mouth with 2 upper teeth and 2 lower teeth.
If you focus only on the yellow part, the Batman Logo Looks like an open mouth with funny looking teeth.
All I could see for months were those funny looking yellow teeth. Man this seems like a bad marketing move to me. And then one day I was driving behind a car with the logo on a bumper sticker and I suddenly focused on the black part and finally saw the bat for the first time. “Oh now I get it”. Kind of like that joke about the Hillbilly using a chain saw for the first time. “Hey, what’s that noise!”
Interpreting instructions can be a challenge for me. “Which corner of the paper did you say to put our name on Miss Hampton?” Especially written instructions. For instance I had a prescription with the following instructions. “Take one pill twice daily.” How is that even possible? I mean you take one pill and it’s gone right. How can you take it twice?
One more and it’s about technology. It took me awhile before I got into texting. But I finally caught on. Sometimes Brenda or myself will get up in the middle of the night for some reason or another. We don’t always have a night light on. So one night we were both up at the same time and we ran into each other in the dark. I was thinking about that at work the next day so I thought I would be romantic and send Brenda a text that says, “It was nice bumping into you in the dark last night.” A few minutes later I get a response that says, “That’s Gross!” I had accidentally sent it to my son Cory. He didn’t seem to appreciate that bit of information.
So welcome to my world.
