The Little Intellect That Could

This morning I attended a fundraising breakfast for a non-profit public health organization that works against those who would bring nuclear waste into our state. They also are trying to stop the ridiculous plan to build a nuclear power plant here. It would be the first.

Noted author Jonathan Schell spoke. I got a free copy of his book "The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger" because I volunteered to help with set up and registration. I was told not to read it at night. It's too scary.

I've gotten a big boost from being in the same space with people who will take time to consider these issues, who enjoy listening to someone compare our relationship with nuclear power to that of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Yes, we are the puny Lilliputians with our flimsy web of imagined security, woven with weak threads by small hands.

It has been my nature to underestimate my ability to thrive in environments where people are really, really smart. I tend to feel inadequate. I have never, EVER, considered myself to be smart. I guess that's because I was always the least intellectual in my family. I wasn't valedictorian. I dropped out of Latin class after two years. My siblings hung in for all four and can still recite Cicero 30 years later.

I was the social one who left my tests unstudied for my senior year. My memory was good, but my use of it centered more on memorizing lines for school plays. Although I did fine in school, I was not in the "smart crowd."

My siblings went to the University of Illinois, and I can remember listening wide-eyed at their stories of all night paperwriting, and professors who gave difficult assignments with the intention of scaring students out of the class. I knew I couldn't go there. It seemed to be a world that was over my head, and so I stayed in safe places where I thought my intelligence would not be severely tested. I came to believe that's where I belonged. Not that the place I attended college was inadequate by any means. I just didn't see it as the intellectual equal of my siblings' school. And I could take classes that would not put me in the cross hairs of professors eager to discover how inadequate I felt myself to be.

I mean after all, I watch Survivor and and no matter how blatantly someone may manipulate my emotions in a book or movie, I still break down and cry. I don't turn up my nose at all the junk in the media, and my idea of fun is an evening of cut- throat Mexican Train (Dominoes). I doubt Thomas Friedman or Noam Chomsky would ever say that! In fact, as I wrote that reference I had to look up Noam Chomsky to see who he really is!!!

So you can see my self-image has never included the idea of strong intellect.

But that is changing. My older sister has been telling me lately that I actually am very smart, that I have to the capability to write well, that the reason I often feel alone is not because I'm defective. Somewhere, in some small place inside me, I'm starting to believe it. Maybe I DO think well on my feet, maybe I CAN hold my own in an intelligent discussion, maybe my perspective IS worth stating in spite of the fact that one of my favorite things to do is watch cooking competitions on TV, or do really easy crossword puzzles.

Today felt good, and tomorrow I want to find more of it--this space where people meet and think and discuss things beyond the ordinary every day. I think I can.