Everyone's always going on about innocence lost...wah wah wah, but what about intelligence lost? It doesn't happen to everyone, just as not everyone loses their innocence (maybe one in ten million) not everyone loses their intelligence. Those lucky few can accomplish anything and the rest of just read about them and think: "I wish that was me!"

It's a commonly know fact that we learn new skills more easily when we're younger - languages are always a popular example. Then our brains start to harden and become listless sludge and the learning slows down to a comfortable trudge. That trudge is still enough to make geniouses out of some of us, but often something happens to shove our brains off the path to greatness and onto that of normalcy. Innocence lost is often an easy event to remember, but intelligence lost is often not.

Think about it...maybe you'll recall the event that irrevocably changed your life and kept you from being the next Bill Gates. I remember mine very well...maybe it will help jog your memory...

When I was six I began taking ballet lessons. It was great fun and we'd prance and leap and piroette all afternoon long. And there was method to our maddness - the big Christmas Show. I can't remember too much about it, but we were little reindeer and had a routine to dance. We pranced here and there - easy enough, but that damn fallen tree is what caused my downfall. It made perfect sense when Valerie Houston explained it: "pretend there's a fallen tree right here and jump over it one by one."

Or maybe it wasn't so easy to understand. The other little reindeer just couldn't grasp the concept of jumping one at a time. I was somewhere in the middle of the pack (or are reindeer in schools? I can never keep that straight) so I should have been the fourth or fifth to jump, but as all the other reindeer saw fallen trees popping up beneath them simultaneously while I only saw the original fallen tree, they all jumped first and I jumped second.

Every practice was the same - they'd jump; I'd jump. I tried to reason with one of my classmates: Kim Fields. I don't think she was the Tootie Kim Fields, but who knows. She helped me none on The Facts Of Life and she helped me none that day. She just could not see the same fallen tree I saw.

Finally, the big night - the performance. Same old drill, but now we had our little antlers on and all our mommies were watching. The dance began - I pranced, I spun, I leaped. I saw the fallen tree looming ahead. But that's not all I saw. I saw my perception of the tree, though correct, was DIFFERENT. My not-yet-listless-sludge of a brain beneath my antlers contemplated that. Did I want to be DIFFERENT? HELL NO! As the first little reindeer leaped over the fallen tree, I did as the others and leapt over nothing but air. I had become a stupid reindeer, but one of the pack/school/pod. I belonged.

Not only did I finally belong in my pack/school/pod/gaggle, I now belonged in mainstream society. As I removed the little antlers from my head, I removed my shot at true intelligence. Oh, there were small victories like being the only one to get the answer to "Which direction do all rivers flow?" in third grade and the National Merit Scholarship. I'm no idiot (or so I like to think), but I often wonder what kind of reindeer I could have been.

12/22/97