Does ANYONE Think as Literally as Me?

I’m a living paradox. My best friend, a former CEO, will tell you “Denise is one of the smartest people I know.” I’m prized for my quick wit, my humor, and my eagle eye for editing anyone’s writing, even when I’m reading for pleasure. I am highly intelligent, but only in the pockets of topics that interest me. Everything else is just noise. Charlie Brown’s teacher talking. That is, until my inattentiveness creates a vacuum in my knowledge and bites me in the ass. Those are the hard lessons I never forget.

It doesn’t help matters that my touch-of-the-‘tis brain causes me to think in literal terms. I take things at face value more often than I’d care to admit (as you may recall from my recent “WTAF Are Table Stakes” post).

I love, love, love to play pub trivia. The one and only cruise I took, with my Florida tennis team, I never got sunburnt — never the norm for my vampire skin — because I was always indoors competing on somebody’s trivia team. My brain is a treasure trove of weirdly random factoids on a wide variety of topics.

One of my proudest moments in recent history was the night my team won a highly competitive pub trivia contest. My husband was brilliant with art, music, and film trivia. My pinball voiceover friend Trudy knew literature and current events. Her husband Mark (a famed pinball designer) knew sports history and pop culture. I filled in the gaps. This weekly event was run by “The Adjudicator,” a gentleman who wore his white hair too long, donned a black judge’s robe, and spoke with the authoritative, booming drama voice of someone who does Ren Faires on the weekends and sprinkles milady into everyday conversation.

The final competition at the end of the night was always guessing the identities of random famous people on his black and white print-outs. The Adjudicator included leathered-up burlesque queen Dita Von Teese on every printout — which told me more about his fetishes than I cared to know — but most of the images were hard to guess, especially if they were old sports figures or musicians.

On this particular night, The Adjudicator’s print-out bore a vintage 1930s image of a woman sitting on the grass. She had curly, short, medium-brown hair, long-assed legs stretched out before her, bobby socks, and low-heeled shoes. I was vibrating with excitement. I knew who this was! My team jumped for joy when we got it right. I was the only one in that bar who had just finished reading Julia Child’s biography. (Biographies are in that aforementioned “pocket of topics” luring my hyperfocus.) This image was lifted right from its pages, taken during Julia’s pre-OSS and pre-PBS-French-cooking eras.

Contrast that “smart moment” to my sophomore year of college. One weekend my boyfriend and I visited two of my besties at Western Illinois University — the other two Denise’s in my Denise Trio from high school. They were roommates attending college there. As we were driving to a campground, Denice’s beau pointed out a home set far back from the road that was part of “The Underground Railroad.” In high school, I was too busy giggling, passing notes, and writing the underground newsletter to pay attention to any boring old history class. But at this moment, as President Obama’s pastor Reverend Wright famously said of 9-11, “The chickens had come home to roost.”

“It just looks like an old farmhouse to me,” I shrugged. And then I said THE THING. The words that will forever live in infamy…

“But where’s the actual railroad?”

Some of my less-than-informed ideas I can blame on my adoptive dad who raised me. We didn’t learn he had Klinefelter Syndrome until he was 82, and only because his endocrinologist requested a rare blood test. By then, Dad had already imparted to me a lifetime of disinformation wisdom.

When I was learning to read, I asked him, “Daddy, what’s this word?” pointing to the word business. (For context, my dad had dropped out of school in eighth grade to work on his parents’ rented farm, and his reading skills were…er…not great.) Dad told me the word was pronounced “busyness,” and for years afterward, I had to really concentrate to process that word correctly as I read it.

Over time, I’ve learned to keep my disinformed musings to myself, especially after this gem:

My first husband Paul and I were driving back from our honeymoon in Galena, Illinois when we passed this small factory near my childhood home.

“Do you think it’s weird that there aren’t any bushes or shrubs?” I asked him.

Paul turned down the Joe Satriani guitar licks blasting from his car stereo. “What are you talking about?”

“That big, yellow sign — it says ‘Plant Entrance’ and there are no bushes or foliage anywhere to be found.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No...why?” I felt the suspicion building that I had just done it again.

“Who told you that is what that sign meant?”

“My dad.”

Paul knew my dad’s limited intellect, which tickled his funny bone even harder. Paul’s pitch-perfect imitations of my dad were legendary. He erupted into laughter as happy tears rolled down his apple cheeks. He had the heartiest laugh.

“Denise! Think for a moment: what’s another word for ‘factory’? Come on, fill in the blank for me. Manufacturing…?”

“Plant?…Plant.…Ohhhhhh, PLANT!” As that fluorescent bulb above my head finally flickered on, I hunkered down in my passenger seat, face hot, humiliated. I remember thinking, “Dammit, he’s done it to me again!”

But in retrospect, I can’t blame my dad. I blame my too-trusting brain.

It was never on my too-trusting brain’s radar that the charming guy hitting on me was married with children. Or that my girlfriend was lying to me about her pedophile husband’s imprisonment. Or that my client wasn’t really dying of some rare disease so he couldn’t pay for my already-rendered services. I hate my brain for never looking beyond face value. But you know what I hate even more?

Those who exploit and deceive all of us gentle, trusting souls who still want to believe the best in people.

The good news is, my ADHD brain forgets the betrayals. I trust and I trust again. No matter how hard the narcissists try, I can’t be reformed.