College . 06/25/2008 11:44 PM . Maggie Dougher

The first academic lie I ever told involved a Berenstain Bear. I was three years old. I have not, fortunately, told very many since, but this particular lie did much to determine the course of my intellectual life for years after it was told. It taught me the benefits of being counted with that elite cadre: the “gifted” children. Ever since then, from board-book theatrics to the Latin pun I’ve included in the title of this article (Nemo, besides being a cute little Pixar-animated fish, is also the Latin word for “Nobody”), my life has been largely an effort to recover from my IQ and figure out what this thing they call “knowledge” is actually for. And it all started with a book about a bear and his hat.

My pet theory is that a good portion – if not all – of my intelligence is due to one everyday phenomenon: my mother took the time to teach me to read. Since the moment I could pronounce the word ‘book,’ I have been an obsessive reader. My mother was only too happy to let me drag her to the library as often as I could – early childhood literacy is a good excuse for a sink full of dirty dishes – where we would sit and read and re-read The Cat in the Hat, et cetera, until, around age four, I could make some meaningful connection between the words my mother said and the fascinating black-and-white code under the pictures.

So, I had a two or three-year head-start on my peers in the acquisition of knowledge. That’s about it. Unimpressive, perhaps, to you. In my young mind, however, this difference and advantage was what “made me special,” in the Sesame Street sense of the phrase. My relatives and neighbors oohed and ahhed over my early-blooming brain-power – and I loved showing it off. So when the opportunity came for me to prove my brilliance, that is, to “read aloud” for the first time as a tender toddler, I jumped at it.

No matter that I couldn’t actually “read” quite yet.

The book that would serve as the platform for my brilliance was written and illustrated by Stan and Jan Berenstain, and it was my and my sister’s favorite at the time. It involved a skinny bear in blue going to a store to try on several hats, only to tell the frustrated proprietor in the end that he is perfectly happy with the hat he came in wearing. My mother, I think, hoped it would teach us contentment and steer us away from the evils of materialism, which were already manifesting in our morbid taste for Fruit Loops and Barbies. We, on the other hand, were more interested in the page of the skinny bear wearing a gaudy pink hat with flowers in it. “Too frilly!!” we’d shout along with the page when we came too it. Since we read the thing nearly every night, and since the entire book consisted of the word “too” and sundry two-syllable adjectives, I had the thing memorized before you could say “wunderkind.”

What I needed next was a credulous and convincible audience. My mother was always a possibility, but she had picked up the healthy habit of never being too impressed by her firstborn. I was shy of the neighbors, there was no good excuse to bring the book to church, and my mother’s people lived too far away. It would have to be my father’s set: rich, affectionate, easily-impressed USC grads.

Adoration was assured.

So, the next day-trip we took to my grandparents’ South Bay beach pad, the book came along. I toddled up to my grandmother, a school teacher whose sole purpose in life seemed to be feeding me junk food and buying me gifts. Maybe I’d finagle a new Barbie out of this one.

“Grammy, will you let me read to you?”

I could not have planned a more pristine reaction. Soon enough I had grandparents, uncles, aunts, and family friends all gathered around, waiting for my display of toddlerhood genius. As I am no longer any kind of genius, I cannot recite with perfection the details of my performance. I do distinctly remember reaching an adjectival melting point near the end of the book (“Too . . .! Too . . .! Too . . .!), tripping over a few words, and becoming terrified that I would mess up the order. Luckily, there were pictures to clue me in that the last word on the page was, indeed, “bumpy.” The applause was thunderous; at least, it sounded so to me. It would grow louder within the next year, as I left behind my drama-queen stage and really did learn to read.

I had, at the age when most children are content to run things over with tricycles and bruise their knees on Slip-and-Slides, discovered my calling. I was a “bookworm.” A “bright child.” And it was my job to make sure everybody knew it. No fact was too small, no Usborn© history book too thick to escape my greedy grade-school intellectualism. And I asked for no rewards but the bemused and surprised smiles of the adults in my life: the uncles, neighbors, and Sunday School teachers who didn’t quite believe that I knew what King Henry VIII ate for breakfast and who the Assyrians were.

Those years were, in my limited memory, defined by books and little else. They were also defined by my being a know-it-all. The purpose of knowledge eluded me, so I hoarded mine like pirate treasure, and hurled random pieces-of-eight at whomever passed close enough for my aim. My academic presumption grew as I did: from preschool play-acting to racing my friends through standardized tests and making sure that everyone in my church youth group knew that, yes, I had brought a copy of Paradise Lost to read on our mission trip to Mexico.

To make it worse, my particular brand of sensitive braininess merited being schooled at home; so, not only was I a smart-aleck, I was a small-sized smart-aleck in a really tiny pond, constantly called upon by the adults in my life to prove something to the world. Things that would indicate anti-social obsessions to any normal person were to me signs that I was the world’s Last Great Hope. Reading five books a month was practically the Fifth Classical Virtue. To hear some people talk, the future of America hung on my ability to memorize the names of the Presidents and recite how a congressional bill becomes law; though, if this is the case, I and my peers have saved the world ten times over by now. Who knows? Maybe I just missed the inspiring theme music and the ticker-tape parade?

I realize now that homeschoolers are not the only people who go through this; most middle-class kids who show even a hint of promise at a young age are thrown into tot-sized honor programs and told that, if they stay in school and take enough pictures of themselves tutoring homeless children and picking up beach-trash, they will be accepted to an Ivy League and become the next Barack Obama (or Ronald Reagan, take your pick). Heaven forbid you prefer to, say, work on cars or cook or build houses. No, the only proper use of an above-average IQ is incarceration in the halls of academia for as long as possible, and thence to gain admittance into the upper echelons of business, politics, and culture – the younger, the better.

I’ve run on this “fast-track” treadmill for most of my life, and if I’ve failed miserably to really “make it” by now in worldly terms, it is because my heart failed to want what everyone said my mind deserved.

It might’ve even been the treadmill itself that saved me from whole-hearted pursuit of the upper-echelons; it wasn’t until I arrived at a college full of other similarly “gifted” young people that I realized just how really un-important I was. The pond grew exponentially, and the self-seeming-shark realized she was nothing but a little lost clown-fish, coming to grips with the fact that nobody cared what Henry VIII ate for breakfast.

Knowledge and intellect, by themselves, are narrow and flimsy things to build a life upon. As anyone who has ever attended a DragonCon or ComicCon could tell you: bookworms in large groups can be very, very scary in a tragic kind of way. Sure, it says a lot about your intellect if you can recite large amounts of the Silmarillion and The Faerie Queene, or pull names like Montesquieu and Machiavelli into your day-to-day conversation. It feels good when your favorite professor lets you talk for an entire class period. The warm fuzzies that come with “Summa cum laude” being read after your name on graduation day last for a few days, I’m sure (I wouldn’t know). But what does any of this really say about the state of my mind? What does it say about my soul? If the high-school drop-out next door is altogether braver, more loyal, more honest, more generous than I am, I have wasted all the years spent besting people at spelling bees and science fairs.

I hope I’m not coming off as an anti-intellectualist grump, because that’s the last place I want my point to lead. Knowledge should enlighten and empower us to better our lives, and thus improve the world. Knowledge, even without some practical utility, enables that built-in part of every man which urges us to explore, to wonder, to create. In short, knowledge is too damn important to waste making sure that the world knows how smart we are. So wake up, fellow “Nemos” of world: acknowledge that the ocean is too big for just one of us to fill, shoulder the responsibility given to us by our intellect, and leave the Berenstain Bear book at home.

Maggie Dougher is an unemployed poet from Southern California. She hates slackers, so she hopes that first adjective goes away before she is forced to hate herself

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