Road Apples
Sept. 22, 2008

Adult Attention Deficit Disorder and reading

By Tim Sanders

It is sometimes difficult to control your reading habits when you have a computer and Attention Deficit Disorder. I have had ADD since I was a kid. Had there been an official diagnosis for the disorder back then, I’d probably have been given some pills for it and it would have gone away. Kids like me were not diagnosed, we were only told to pay attention and quit fidgeting and shooting paper wads or we’d have to go to the principal’s office again.

My friend Bruce Douglas and I both suffered from undiagnosed ADD, and we were often punished for making faces and distracting the other children who didn’t have the condition. Because of his ADD, Bruce sometimes found himself compelled, through no fault of his own, to swallow large quantities of air and then raise his hand and entertain the class by belching the answer to a question just posed by the teacher. I could not produce those kinds of deep, resonant bullfrog belches, although I certainly admired Bruce’s talent. My ADD caused me to blurt out things which my teachers often considered "smart alecky," and then regret it later when I found myself parked in my usual chair in the principal’s office. But of course there was no Ritalin back then.

My attention deficit worked like this:


MRS. ATHERTON: "Now if you’ll look at the blackboard, you’ll see that I’ve written a fraction, with the numerator on top, and the denominator on the bottom. As you can see, one-third can’t be added to one-half unless ...."

ME (thinking): "Hey, I got a loose tooth in front."

MRS. ATHERTON: "Blah, blah, blah, blah ... common denominator ... blah, blah .... blackboard ..."

ME (rummaging through my desk): "Oooh, a rubber band! I bet I could hit Pat Kelly’s right ear, and he wouldn’t know ... "

PAT: "OUCH!"

MRS. ATHERTON: "TIMOTHY SANDERS, DID YOU SHOOT THAT RUBBER BAND?"

ME: "I was cleaning it and it went off.”


My wife had ADD as a child, too. I know this because her sisters have told me the story of how her ADD once caused her to lose her train of thought and kick her kindergarten teacher in the ankle, under the impression that the poor woman was Cinderella’s wicked stepmother. In the first grade she had another ADD attack which caused her to kick an altogether different teacher in the shin because of that woman’s uncanny resemblance to Adlai Stevenson. Marilyn still suffers from the disorder, and if you doubt this, go shopping with her. She won’t kick you in the shin, but she can go into a grocery store for a can of tomato paste, become distracted by all the shiny objects on the shelves, and come out with three carts full of provisions and not a single can of tomato paste. She can’t help it, she has a disorder.

But where was I? Oh yeah, we were talking about my ADD reading problem. I have a book of cartoons by John T. McCutcheon, published in 1905. McCutcheon was an Indiana farm boy who graduated from Purdue in 1889 and eventually became a war correspondent and a Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune.

At any rate, perusing that ancient volume of cartoons, which covered topics ranging from the Chicago Exposition of 1893 to President Teddy Roosevelt’s exercise regimen at Oyster Bay, I became curious about McCutcheon’s life.

Marilyn found the cartoonist’s autobiography, "Drawn from Memory," and ordered it for me. I’ve read a quarter of the book, and have already learned that McCutcheon was not only considered the "grandpappy of American political cartoonists," but he also was on speaking terms with William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral Dewey, and Booth Tarkington.

Those names distracted me from the McCutcheon autobiography and led me to the Internet, to read about Dewey’s battle at Manila Bay. Then I googled Tarkington, who wrote the two Pulitzer Prize winning novels, "Alice Adams" and "The Magnificent Ambersons." Marilyn said she’d seen the movie "Alice Adams," starring Katharine Hepburn and somebody who may have been Fred MacMurray. So of course I became distracted by that and had to find the movie on the Internet and confirm that, yes, Fred MacMurray was indeed the leading man. Naturally I had to read the synopsis to find out what happened to Alice.

Then questions arose about something called an Infante Eulalie, which McCutcheon said he encountered and admired at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. Neither Marilyn nor I knew what an Infante Eulalie was, but I suspected it was some sort of a musical instrument. Of course I had to google the name on the Internet, and it turned out that Infante Eulalie was not a tiny stringed instrument at all, but the daughter of Queen Isabella II of Spain. The same article mentioned the Spanish House of Bourbon, and for a moment I was tempted to find out just where that house was, and how much bourbon was left, but I resisted the temptation and stuck to Eulalie. Her full name was Maria Eulalia Francisca de Asis Margarita Roberta Isabel Francisca de Paula Cristina Maria de las Piedad. Apparently she called herself Eulalie because there’d have been no room for all those initials on her luggage.

Later that evening, while Marilyn was reading aloud from the McCutcheon autobiography, I became curious about his good friend and fellow Purdue graduate George Ade. Again I went to the Internet and found that Ade was sort of Indiana’s version of Mark Twain, and was considered one of that era’s very best humorists. He wrote several books, many illustrated by John McCutcheon.

Ade became a wealthy man, and along with Purdue alumnus David E. Ross, donated money for the University to build Ross-Ade Stadium in 1924, where the Boilermakers still play football today. The reference to Ross prompted me to forget about Ade for awhile and read a fairly lengthy Internet article about Ross and his Rostone Corporation in Lafayette, Indiana. When I finally got back to Ade, I discovered that one of his books, "Fables in Slang," was available for downloading on the Internet, so I did.

This resulted in my reading page after page of Ade’s hilarious fables, written in Midwestern slang at the beginning of the 20th Century. One of those fables told of a young man whose unhealthy diet caused him to have a stroke, and this reminded me that I should investigate a statement I’d recently heard on TV that strict vegetarian diets can lead to brain shrinkage. I confirmed the details of that story, and then was distracted by an Internet headline which read: "Red Lobster restaurant evacuated after man releases pepper spray and leaves." I read that story, twice, but there was no information as to just what kind of leaves the man released.

As you can see, a fully grown man with ADD and a computer has a lot of trouble finding a good book and sticking with it from cover to cover without taking numerous detours along the way. If I thought it would help, I’d take a pill for it, but I’m afraid it’s too late for that.