Maybe I was suffering from ADD in the days before ADD existed

In recent months, I have been having a big problem.

Is my office overstimulating me?

I can't seem to concentrate. At least I can't seem to concentrate long enough to get much serious work done. I'll set up at the computer with the idea of working, and before five or 10 minutes go by, I'll put on some music, put in a DVD and turn on the television or start checking baseball scores on the Internet.

In the end, if I get anything done at all, it's a short piece at All Voices or a blog entry here.

I have a book that was two-thirds finished three years ago and it's still two-thirds finished. A big part of that has been the difficult health problems my wife has been going through and the fact that I am pretty much her caregiver. But that doesn't mean there was no time at all to write.

All of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I find myself wondering if maybe I've always had ADD.

Or ADHD, as they now seem to be calling it.

Adults get it too, and it can be every bit as much of a problem for them as it is for teenagers.

My first real exposure to it came in 1990, my first summer in Los Angeles. I had a blind date to meet someone, so we were getting together for lunch. She asked if she could bring her young son and I was fine with it.

She warned me that he was a "little bit hyperactive." It turned out he was literally bouncing off the walls. At the end of our date, I asked her a question.

"Isn't there medication that can help with that?"

"He is medicated," she replied.

I always thought teachers were too quick to call spirited children hyperactive and start medicating them. I remember saying there was no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder when I was in school.

But I wonder.

For the first six years of school, my grades were nearly perfect. But when junior high -- and probably puberty -- came along, all of a sudden my grades started sinking. When I reached high school, I was a National Merit Scholar and had great SAT scores, but other than band and physical education, I didn't get a single A for the year in an academic class.

I got C's in all my math classes except one, but got a 756 out of 800 on my math achievement test.

When I got to college, I literally couldn't study. If I had to memorize lists of things for a test, I literally could not do it. I think it's one reason I've always had so much trouble learning languages. Memorizing vocabulary was something that didn't come easy for me.

I have a pretty good memory in general and things tend to stick without trying. I realized yesterday that I remembered one of the first phone numbers my family ever had, a number so old (from 1957) that it had only six digits.

MIchigan 1284.

Within a year, phone numbers were standardized to seven digits across the country, and our phone number became BEverly 3-2929. I don't remember if we had an area code in 1958. Area codes made their debut in 1947 in big cities, but didn't cover the entire country until 1966.

Why do I remember those numbers? I don't know, especially the first one. But there are other phone numbers I haven't used in 30 years -- the childhood homes of my friends Mick Curran and Gary Oleson -- that still stick in my mind.

Why can I remember theme songs from TV shows I didn't even particularly like?

"There's Grandpappy Amos, the head of the clan. He roars like a lion but he's gentle as a lamb. And then there's Luke who beams with job since he made Kate Mrs. Luke McCoy ..."

"The Real McCoys" was the granddaddy of all the hillbilly shows. It came on when I was 7, and 57 years later, I still remember the song.



Maybe I don't have ADD.

Maybe I'm just weird.