Earth Angel

Maybe he has ADD and maybe he doesn't. Is dreaminess a disorder?

Andy forgets where he's going before he gets there. His misplaced sweatshirts, lunch boxes, and mittens stock the school's lost and found. Doors shut on him because he can't remember to hold them open. In class teachers say he "has attention issues" -- their polite code for space cadet.

His head isn't empty; perhaps it's too full. Mornings he sits at the kitchen table forgetting to eat breakfast (he has also forgotten to put on socks and comb his hair) because he is reading about parquet floors at Versailles, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's political future, or gas mileage statistics for Hummers. Worry eats up space in Andy's head. Last summer, on Iowa nights so sticky even mosquitoes were sluggish in the heat, he quietly turned off his window fan each evening after I said goodnight. It wasted electricity, he'd tell me later. It heated up the atmosphere. About the same time, his father and I started flicking off the radio at the lead-in to any story about Europe's deadly heat wave. If we forgot, Andy was soon teary over global warming.

School is about the only place where Andy's head is not bursting with factoids, tidbits, schemes, and ideas. He has never thrived in the classroom, despite mostly great teachers and an interesting and challenging curriculum. Because tests have identified him as intellectually "gifted," he even attends a special enrichment course designed to fend off boredom. Yet each year, Andy dislikes school more. And each year, his teachers grow less gentle with this boy who knows so much and does so little with it.

Here is the problem: Ask Andy to tell you about the Byzantine civilization or the decisive battles of the Civil War, and he will do so effortlessly. But ask him to bring home his social studies book, write out a spelling assignment, or neatly and correctly number and answer 15 basic math problems, and he'll likely botch all three tasks. Is it laziness? Stubbornness? A learning disability?

Teachers see a kid who knows more than they do about Franklin Roosevelt and Frank Lloyd Wright, who tells them all about China's Forbidden City and the Tower of London. He's the de facto help desk for computer-gaming fifth and sixth graders at his elementary school. So why can't he remember a little homework? And if by some miracle work makes it home, completing a few assignments inevitably stretches out over two, three, sometimes four painful hours. By the end of those sessions, Andy's head invariably sags limply on the table, and I am left wondering if he knows anything at all.