Hard work usually pays off, except when it doesn’t.
I distinctly remember this man’s name. I won’t say it here because I’m a complete and total wuss. I think there is a chance that somewhere, somehow, he will see it and say, “Hey, that’s me!” I’m not sure I like the implications of that, but it’s not going to stop me. It will just prod me into changing his name to protect the innocent. So, with that disclaimer in place, here goes my story.
Kyle worked for my mother, as a student proctor in the developmental math lab at Lamar University. He was witty, charming, endearing, sensitive, and about 10 years older than me. As a dewey-eyed 18 year old, I thought he was perfect. I wanted to date him in the worst way, but it was not to be. First of all, Mom was his boss, and so it would have been weird. Secondly, he was committed in a long-term relationship. But even more important: Kyle was gay.
All that aside, I found Kyle delightful. I eventually got over wanting to date him, and instead talked with him for hours while waiting for Mom to give me a ride home. He could talk about anything, but he and I seemed to hit it off on one particular level. See, in the middle of Beaumont/Port Arthur, Texas, surrounded by blue collar refinery workers and white collar engineers, Kyle and I shared the same crippling neurological disorder: We were “right-brained.”
Never mind that the whole left-brain vs. right-brain theory seems to fall short of fact. Never mind Einstein’s axiom, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Never mind that creative thinking is actually what drives advances in science, technology, and math. Creativity is important, OK? We get it. But in the refinery towns of Southeast Texas, it got you nowhere. Details ruled. Gritty, exacting, theorems scribbled on multiple chalkboards were were as good as currency. If you could keep the blue-collar work force guessing at what kind of number theory you understood, you earned a one way ticket to the aristocracy. Throw a poem at them and they would generally run away screaming, but derive the quadratic formula and you might as well live on Mount Olympus.
So, what’s a “right-brained” guy/gal to do? Kyle only had one answer for himself: Change his college major to engineering.
I mean, he was right there on campus at Lamar University, trying to find himself anyway. He had the all of the forces of mathematics with him, including my mother. OK, so he wasn’t gifted in mathematics, but was that going to stop him? “No!” said Kyle, “I will stay up nights and weekends and become the mathematician I should be. Then I will become a engineer”
Kyle failed math over and over. He simply didn’t have the gift. Left brain, right brain, corpus callosum challenged, whatever, he just couldn’t make it all click. I have to wonder why he would do this to himself. Kyle was so clearly gifted in the arts. He could have become an interior designer, a fashion consultant, a theatrical makeup artist, anything. Instead, he chose to torture himself with advanced calculus and differential equations. My only conclusion is that Kyle was going to school for the job he thought he wanted.
Key word, “Thought.” Kyle saw a vision of golf shirts, suits, expensive client dinners, and a handsome paycheck. He could not have guessed that the arcane mathematics he was struggling through at Lamar University would not be going away anytime soon. Instead, they would haunt him for the time he spent on the job, at whatever company would hire him. Did he really think that he could finish college as a mathematician and then coast through a profession as an engineer?
That remained to be seen. First he had to pass his classes. After 10 years of this, Kyle was still in school, still working in the developmental math lab for Mom, and still trying like mad to struggle through advanced mathematics and become an engineer. In fact, Kyle actually started his college career as a student of Mom’s. He was there because he seriously needed help with his understanding of math.
I can, and do, look at this two ways: First, I think the world of Kyle. This is a story of tenacity and determination that should reside in the annals of history with other stories of its kind. Oh, you know, like Homeward Bound, the Incredible Journey. But then I am left with a stack of other metaphors that stick around for a lot longer. Here’s one: Kyle volunteered himself to become an ugly duckling. He looked at someone else and said, “I want to be that person.” He saw the person’s lifestyle, the “tricks” they could do, and the society seemed to value them. He undervalued himself so much that he believed that the only way out of his own emotional turmoil would be to transform himself into something he was not. So, he decided to turn his back on his own identity and try, instead, to become a duck. How sad that he never saw it that way. If he could hold himself to the challenge of battling differential equations for 10 years, how much successful could he have been in something that suited him? How much more beautiful could the duck be if it only began to think, act, and fly like a swan?
Or, a better question: Kyle, why continue to live in Beaumont/Port Arthur? The answer to that could be a can of worms, so I will forget I asked it.
This is my greatest cruelty to you as my reader. I have no idea, from this point, what happened to Kyle. I think I need to call Mom and find out, because now I’m genuinely curious. It might be that Kyle conquered his math challenges and even grew to love calculus. It is possible that he is a leading engineer for a petrochemical company somewhere, and that I would be privileged just to shake his hand. If that’s the truth, I have one wish for him only: I wish him the greatest happiness on earth.
But I still think that if Kyle had studied interior design, I might be watching him on the H&G channel some night. Is it a waste? I can’t say. That’s between Kyle and . . . Kyle.
