While all of this is going on, through the late Sixties and early Seventies, another kid exactly the same age as me is having exactly the same experiences, a thousand miles away.
It’s my first cousin, Kirk, the son of my father’s sister. He was famously born on my due date, bumping me back three weeks. Our near-simultaneous births were a family phenomenon, and the similar contemporaneous structure of our two families meant that we all got together whenever we could – which wasn’t often, given the distance.
But Kirk and I were connected, almost telepathically, across those distances, all those years. We both discovered science fiction – Asimov, Bradbury, et al – at the same time; ditto Star Trek; we were both space program junkies. We were both self-taught guitarists, with natural ears for music that were unparalleled even in our very musical families.
Twin sons of different mothers.
We would be closer to each other, throughout our lives, than we were to our own brothers, due to our intellectual and artistic connection. We remain that close, even today.
But here’s the thing: Kirk wasn’t ADD.
He doesn’t fidget. He doesn’t get up and walk around spontaneously. He doesn’t blurt out inappropriate comments in meetings. He doesn’t stay up 72 hours straight re-binge-ing X-Files episodes he’s seen 12 times. He does occasionally launch paper airplanes randomly, it’s true, but this is more an intellectual exercise than an expenditure of nervous energy.
He can concentrate for many hours straight on tasks he doesn’t much care for, which I can’t do; he can write excellent papers on subjects he finds mundane, which I can’t do; he can code for days on end, which I can’t do.
It is distantly possible that Kirk is ADD, and has simply handled it with the focus and excellence he brings to his career and his family life; but if so, he has done it so perfectly that it is invisible to me.
There are times when I tell myself he is indeed ADD, and that he’s just that good. It gives me a feeling that if I stick with it, I can do the same.
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