A bit of self reflection today. I was born on the leading edge of Generation X, just as the conflict in Vietnam was escalating, I joined the mass of mankind in the world (or, 1965).
I struggled in early education, and I was never sure why. My parents whispered behind my back, and I occasionally caught snippets. But one thing I do know is that I had poor hand-eye coordination.
It is why my penmanship is – to be blunt – awful. And it is also why I was not a natural of playing ball sports (baseball in particular).
Of course, my parents tried to improve it. But, in the early 1970’s there weren’t a lot of fun ways for a kid to work on their hand eye coordination. I recall my dad trying to teach me to play banjo at the ripe old age of 5. That didn’t go well, as you can imagine.
The irony is that had I been born a decade later, mid Gen X so to speak, I would have had the growing video game craze to help train my hand-eye coordination. Perhaps that would have made the difference.
Or perhaps not. I suspect that I lie somewhere on the spectrum, and as was common back in the late 60’s and 70’s it was just not diagnosed.
C’est la vie. Now that both my parents have passed, I am left to wonder what my early childhood was like from the snippets of my memories.
