What Is Intellect?

BY KEITH TUCKER

Special to The Enterprise

Several of you have complimented this column and for that I thank you. Several have said they didn’t know I had it in me. I can see that. I’ve been told often I’m smarter than I look. I still remember the first time Faye Brooks told me X can be any number in algebra 1 and Otis Barron told me the square root of negative one is the imaginary number I. Then came all the magical things that could be done with that information. All through my educational career I was almost a B student. A few years ago, I decided to deal with my ADHD and try some of the medicine that was available. I should have done that a lot sooner. Apparently, the doctors that screen patients for the prescription have had people who didn’t qualify try to get it, but it didn’t take long to decide that I did need it.

The best way to describe the effect is without it, my brain is only about half awake until about 11 a.m.  On one day when I ran out before I could get a refill between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m., I yawned over 150 times and yes, after a good night’s sleep. If you’ve ever driven in the fog, well that’s what my brain is seeing every morning. Which brings me to the difficulty of getting prescription pills like this refilled.  Every month I have to call the doctor’s office, ask for a refill, go to the clinic and get a hard copy of the script and hand deliver it to the pharmacy. I guess this is considered some sort of hard drug, but to me it’s no different than blood pressure medicine. Cholesterol and blood pressure medicines have no such controls. In an effort to control the hydrocodone epidemic, the legislature put a real burden on those who need drugs like this. When I mentioned to a lady the other day about having ADHD, her response was that it took a lot of smarts to run a business like ours. It does of course, and I have some excellent people doing it. It’s not unusual to have crews spread across four states sometimes going to two to three houses in one day. That’s a lot of scheduling, but not as hard as it sounds. We can be in Kentucky and Missouri in under an hour and Arkansas in just over, and add Tennessee, and that’s four.

If it was just installing, that would be hard enough, but we actually manufacture or fabricate everything we install, except for flooring or plumbing parts. So yes, it does take a lot of intellect to get it all made to come together and out the door and several customers have said we did amazing work.

All this said to reinforce the idea that shortcomings do not have to define us. If Helen Keller can live the productive life she did or the blind man who used to come tune our piano can do what they did, then what is the excuse for the rest of us?

Editor’s note: Keith Tucker is a Greenfield resident and owner of The Marble Shop.