The gift that gift gave

Ok. Fine. I'll just admit it. I was a gifted child.

I don't talk much about it because there are only a few gifted children born every generation. Plus it makes ungifted people feel awkward and treat you like a freak even though it's masked gift envy.

As far as my mom's concerned, I was always gifted. But I do remember at about age 4, I recognized the gift. It didn't come in ribbons or bows; gifted people are able to see beyond the tangent obvious. Often what separates ungifted from the gifted is the gift of abstraction. It was definitely a figurative gift. A Child of God? I pondered the (unlikely) theological possibility at like age 6. But definitely a Child of Gift.


Through brief empirical observation, I concluded I was the only gifted child around in small-town Utah. I then used my exceptionally developed aptitude for a priori reasoning to speculate that I may be the only gifted child in America. I definitely sensed there were Japanese and Korean children of gifted extraction. But they attended school like 13 hours a day, so in the end it was probably hard to distinguish the gifteds from the hard workers.

Then in 2nd grade my mom volunteered to lead a group called Odyssey of the Mind. Turned out, there were like 8 gifted children in my class alone, which is extremely unusual to have such a concentration of gift in the same topographical region. They (the Gift Guiders) would separate us an hour a week and we would outperform each other with crosswords, cryptograms, deductive reasoning puzzles and trying to get objects disentangled by using our advanced sense of geometry and spatial reasoning. Another activity involved ping pong balls too, but I don't remember the specifics. I think I was too gifted to actually waste energy excelling at that particular "challenge."

After an hour of touching the gift (that's the day single, 30ish but oddly-living-in-a-small-town Mr. Brown subbed), we would return to the normal class and breeze through rudimentary spelling exercises, laughable times tables and your run-of-the-mill art projects that would consume those without gift.

Of course, gifted children turn into gifted adults, with or without the capitalistic education model formality (though I did go on to excel in college, my gift wasn't recognized by the Ivy League. But I've come to understand their Myopic predisposition). These days, I've learned to relate on a surface level with the non-gifted.

And see, you probably didn't even notice (though I'm sure in some ungifted way, you did).