#79. First Christmas (Wednesday, December 25, 1996)

What was your best day…of being smart beyond your years?

Chronologically, this is the earliest entry on this list. Meaning this was the first time in life when I had a day and went, “Hmm… that was pretty good, let me keep the arcane details around it stored in my memory [because I might have occasion to write them all down (on a not-yet-invented platform) sometime down the road].”

This particular day was more symbolic of the year – my first grade year – as a whole. Until the day I come up with some kind of brilliant world-changing invention (still holding out hope¹), I believe that this was the year I was at my point of highest promise relative to my age group in my entire life².

Not to brag too much about my six-year-old self (or trash what happened the twenty-six years after), but there was some legit genius being shown that year. First, with math, I had been doing the whole self-study-math-that’s-several-grades-above with my parents for a few years now, and had reached Grade 4/5 where I was grasping concepts like decimals and measuring the volume of (simple) three-dimensional objects. Then with art, I had to taken to drawing these detailed, abstract creatures/humanoids that I can faintly remember – and was told by my parents – were at another level (they’ve all been thrown out, unfortunately).

And finally, with writing, one day I decided to supplement our first grade (French immersion) class bookshelf with books that I had written myself.³ By written, I mean crudely drew animals on several sheets of paper, put down the French animal name next to them, created a cover page titled “Animaux”⁴, and stapled them together. But still. I soon created a whole series of these, and some of the other kids in the class began doing the same thing.

The common thread for all this was my parents. My brother hadn’t been born yet, so all their attention had been on me, which likely had to do in part with the three things above. With reading/writing for instance, what I’d do was every day bring home a French book from that bookshelf and work with my mom to translate it into both English and Mandarin Chinese on index cards. Insanely productive for a six-year-old.

It was also, as my mom called it, one of the best years of her life. They had recently found jobs in IT with the government (after many years of school in Toronto) and we’d just moved to Ottawa (#91) and bought a town house. Which leads us to this particular day.

With finally a stable income, my parents not only got me Christmas presents that year, but a lot of them. Something like ten to twelve, chief among them a pair of ice skates. Unlike the abstract art, tri-lingual index cards, and Jeff-authored French books, the video of me opening those presents under the tree has been preserved. And in it, I can see a pure innocent joy that instantly takes me back to that special year and all the great potential it seemed to foretell – even if much of that potential is still unrealized, and the specifics of the memory itself have long passed.

It was my first Christmas, and no doubt my best.

NB (Just to temper the idea of a prodigy six-year-old Jeff): Immediately after the present-opening video, there’s a twenty-second video (from later that same day) of me thrashing around my bedroom like complete moron – it’s as if I’m putting every bit of my mental and physical energy into being as stupid as possible. Then, after I’ve calmed down, there’s a ten-minute piece of me going from room-to-room in the house and pointing out the different objects. Perhaps a side-effect of my savant-like brilliance, in every single room I make sure to point out the ceiling, the walls, and each of the individual doors and windows. It’s wild.⁵

This site, no matter how popular it gets and how much it gets copied, doesn’t count.
Recall a similar thing career-wise from #115.
Thinking about it now, that was the true point where my interest in writing started (#117), though you could scarcely call what I did then “writing”.
French plural of animals. Not 100 percent sure, but I believe I had the right pluralization for my inaugural book.
Also, at the end I do a re-enactment of the first Magic School Bus episode where the kids visit each of the planets. Mainly to do the last scene where Arnold stupidly takes off his helmet on Pluto, has his face frozen to ice, and sneezes like crazy once he (miraculously) recovers. It’s at 21:15, with a trauma warning.