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epitome of incomprehensibility
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A picture of one in a book brought back a memory:
I'm 21 or 22, in an office with a neuropsychologist who's testing me for learning disabilities. This test focuses on language-related disorders. He asks me to define words, and I'm particularly proud of my answer for "breakfast": "In some cultures, people eat three meals a day. The first meal is breakfast."
But then he shows me some cards with pictures and asks me to name them. Objects? No problem. Animals I've barely thought about since I was a kid? Okay at first, but a bird stumps me - a bird with a pouch-shaped lower beak. "I don't remember that one," I say, as if I need to apologize. "A stork?"
But no, it's a pelican.
The neuropsych leaves a message with my parents later on. He's almost certain I don't have a language-related disability such as dyslexia, but there's something else he wants to test for.
But I don't follow up...until next year, when I nearly get kicked out of an MA program in Ontario for handing stuff in late. It's the early days of 2012. I schedule an appointment to see him while I'm in Montreal for an apocalypse_literature_conference.
He finds it amusing that I misremember his first name as Moses. It's something else starting with M, but "Moses" seemed right because his last name is Bible-related.
Is associative thinking a hallmark of my neural weirdness? Am I a card-carrying Hallmark?? Can I charge exorbitant prices for bits of folded paper???
In one of the tests, I have to press a button whenever the letter flashing on a computer screen is an X. The X is my albatross. Or pelican. I keep clicking when the letter is something different.
And too many such pelicans, plus a survey given to me and my parents about my childhood behaviour, leads the non-Moses doctor to diagnose ADHD. Not in that appointment, but in a later call. There are some papers to print that will help me get back into my program. I'm worried that he's just doing this to give me an excuse, a fake doctor's note, because he finds me sympathetic and smart...which is weirdly overconfident, but he did say something nice about my verbal intelligence. My parents relieve AND further worry me by saying, Oh no, honey, you definitely have the thing.
They don't say that exactly.
They say: You can't be THAT hyper as a child and not be a pelican, even if you forget what it's like to be a pelican. We remember. Face the facts of life: it was never a stork.
Okay, they don't say that exactly either.
But I'm curious: why do young children learn about so many kinds of animals, often animals that don't live where they live? And why do adults forget??
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