Chapter 2: Adaptation

"Alex! Please pay attention! What does 'go a-viking' mean?"

"Sorry Ms. Adanis. Young Scandinavian men sometimes abandoned their farms because of lack of money or boredom, and went to rob other countries in boats. They were going 'viking'..."

It was too bad going viking was out of fashion. Alex sympathized with the boredom. Although having more money was appealing too.

The next three months proved a new type of challenge. Long before his stitches were removed, Alex was showing signs of hyperactivity. He had a hard time sitting through a meal. He was fidgeting in his seat, read all the labels on food boxes, and any grocery store advertisements that sometimes made their way to the kitchen. His mother fought against books and television during the family meals, which meant Alex was even more twitchy. His teachers noticed hyperactivity as well. In a depressingly familiar pattern, his parents dragged the formerly near-comatose Alex to medical professionals eager to diagnose new disorders. Luckily, just before his parents filled a prescription for Ritalin intended to treat ADHD, an old-fashioned neurologist suggested trying plenty of physical activity and lots of books. The advice came after Dr. Gryn elicited the fact that despite Alex's inattention, he rarely failed to answer questions from his suspicious teachers. His parents also confirmed that his distractions notwithstanding, he never lost track of the conversation at the dining table.

The result was a much busier life for Alex. He signed up for several YMCA classes, and started carrying several books everywhere. Eventually his mother and his teachers learned to accept — reluctantly — Alex reading everywhere. His ability to keep up with the conversation thread helped. The teachers even endorsed his request to sit in the back of the classroom. In all honesty, Alex didn't care where he sat, as long as he had something to do. It also helped when he started bringing next year's textbooks to class.

Alex also started jogging in the morning, and haunting the library in the afternoon, before dinner and evening classes at YMCA. "Boy, you make me tired!" his father said, looking at his son reading a book, listening to a recorded history lesson on his headphones, and squeezing an adjustable handgrip. He wasn't really surprised when Alex answered, without raising his eyes, "Wasn't my idea to excise the indolence lobe from my brain." It wasn't a new joke, but his father was still impressed by Alex's ability to hear him through the headphones, not to mention his vocabulary.

Alex's parents finally gave up on his sleep time. Alex seemed to go from one extreme to another. After years of sleeping and napping, like a cat, for most of the day, now Alex was wide awake and twitching after 3-4 hours of sleep. He was often coming back from a jog when his parents were starting to make coffee, and reading when they went to sleep. He still didn't like coffee, which caused his mother to proclaim loudly "Thank God! If you had any caffeine, you would be making holes in the ceiling." She was only partly joking.

Alex was also experiencing new challenges finding reading material. After rapidly going through every book and magazine at home (his parents were less successful than they believed in hiding materials they thought inappropriate for an eight-year-old), he discovered a wealth of reading material in the library.

The first challenge was to get the clerks to check out large piles of books for him. The senior librarian had met other youthful bookworms, so after proving he really was reading ten books a day, he was allowed to check out as many fiction books as he could carry. Non-fiction books were limited by subject. The fact that he rarely kept the books longer than three days helped.

The second challenge was reading "adult" books. At first, Alex had to read them in the library, as the circulation desk wouldn't allow him to check them out. Within a few weeks, after his parents signed a special permission form and the senior librarian gave a cautious nod, Alex's card got a special notation, and he no longer had to keep to the increasingly boring "junior" catalog. Alex thought his parents were getting past the "bemused" and entering the "slightly numb" stage regarding his hyperactivity.

The third and more complex challenge for Alex was running out of books he could understand. Not understanding words in more advanced books eventually led to a frustrated request for help. That yielded a pocket dictionary. His quest for efficiency soon led to an unorthodox approach: He sat and read the dictionary from cover to cover. This caused amusement, mixed with no small amount of apprehension from his parents. Alex thought they were rather proud of him, but with a dose of unease. Alex's ability to read and memorize was probably past outstanding and approaching "freaky."

Alas, Alex quickly found that his new and much improved vocabulary was insufficient. While impressing his third-grade teachers and eliciting scorn from his classmates, nearly every other book in the library had words not in the tiny 25,000-word pocket dictionary. When cautiously asked by his parents if he could have forgotten some words, he quickly proved that any definition he didn't know was not in his dictionary.

And the converse, of course. After explanation about different, and different-sized dictionaries, Alex was very indignant that a dictionary ― a reference work to understand obscure words ― would be useless to read some books. He spent awhile in the library talking to the reference librarian and looking at various dictionaries; he decided not to bother with various "little" works. It took him some time to find the printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary, as most people were using the online edition.