Today, in a meeting, I disassociated. I felt myself disassociating.  As a young kid I became very good at doing this while sitting in church. Passing large amounts of time by shutting myself down.  Now I fight that skill as I sit in adult meetings.  Today as I was  glazing over,  I casually acknowledged that fact that I WAS glazing over. and BAM. I had a memory come out of my distant, distant past.

As an elementary school kid, never able to concentrate and being forced to sit for long periods of time listening to things I couldn’t focus on, I decided that I should collect Last Names. I knew of no such existing list, so I found a notebook and sat in church with a hymnal and went through every page writing down the last name of each hymn author. When that was done, I pulled out the church bulletin that had announcements, deacon contact info, Sunday school assignments, and prayer requests for tons of sick people. I cataloged every name, every week.  Each name on a different row, multiple columns per page.  Eventually, this hobby escalated to outside of church cause I felt a weird pressure that things were getting a little too out of control with all these NAMES! So many of them Flying unharnessed throughout the world!! And only me to take on this task. I started waiting till the end of TV movies and would frantically scribble down Last Names as the credits rolled. I would site on the living room stairs reading a book, and stopping every now and then to write down a name.  Knowing that I was only reading the book to FIND names.

Someone should have stopped me. But I was probably being just a little to good at babysitting myself. The result of this being that somewhere in New England rotting in a dump, is the unabridged and unlauded accomplishments of an 8 year old. 

Then I’m back in my head. In 2010. Walking away from the meeting, my friend mumbles, “I’m out of tiles to count in that room.”