Dumb and Dumber

My brother Jesse is one of my best friends. I didn’t realize that until we were in high school. Another best friend is my sister Jennifer. They are both brilliant professionals now. Jesse is a USAID program director in Kenya, and Jennifer is a professor of anthropology in Australia. Our parents had suffered through four miscarriages before they adopted me. People used to say that my siblings would never have been born if it weren’t for me.

When we were teenagers my brother and sister both read over one thousand words per minute and had near perfect recall. I could barely read five hundred words per minute and had maybe eighty percent recall. Our parents were both dazzlingly brilliant as well, with information processing abilities similar to my siblings. I always felt stupid in my family, that I just didn’t have the intellect the rest of them did.