My unshaved chin rests on my arthritic hand. My dry lips uninterested in the fresh coffee steaming under me.
I wait for the meds to kick in – it’s late now, 11:03 AM perhaps they are beginning to work – that is how I able to talk to you now.
Its 11 months now since I started taking them, I don’t resent them; it’s like accomodating a new visitor who has come to stay in my house and has no intention of leaving. The guest chides me into thinking before doing yet keeps me up all too often – paying for my newly-found efficiency with lost sleep.
Latin lesson 1964, I stare out of the high classroom windows of Eccleston square. We had just run round the square more than once with Mr. Young, our Latin master. His small brown globetrotter suitcase Pandora, perched on his desk, Rufus, his pen in hand loaded with the brightest of scarlet ink.
I stare more.
“Tregaskis!…”
Somewhere a voice shouted – spiking a dagger in my little balls…
Terrified, I look round.
Its no use, I had no idea what was going on, lost… I attempt to feign an answer.
He summons me up with a curling finger to the front of the class, picks up a ping pong bat –
I am humiliated again, the bat gently taps my bottom, caressing it in an exaggerated ritualistic way.
The class laughter.
The class, sons of cabinet ministers, venerable scientists and old money parents. All the world has parents like that, don’t they?
I return, grinning to my desk – feigning amusement to reduce the loss of dignity, turning to inner rage.
I look down at my desk, admiring tattooed with endless thick layers of ink rendering my daydreams of spaceships, planes nazi tanks…
I will never understand ablative or remember the fifth declension. I does not serve any purpose.
I was diagnosed last may with ADHD.
That knowledge serves me no purpose now, either.