I spent the earliest part of my elementary school years being labeled as "special" - as in, "retarded" - before I was relabeled as the other type of "special" - as in, "gifted" - and quite frankly, a lot of the teachers I had seemed much more comfortable teaching me when they thought I was stupid than when they thought I was smart.

One of the several times my parents were called in for an unscheduled conference with my teachers was when I was seven years old, and my second-grade teacher told us to write a story about Thanksgiving, with a drawing to accompany it, that could be about "anything at all," so long as it was related to Thanksgiving.

I wrote the story of Super-Turkey, a Superman-suited hero turkey, who saved his fellow turkeys from being eaten by the Pilgrims and Indians of the first Thanksgiving, when he used his heat vision to cook all the Pilgrims and Indians, so that the turkeys could have a Thanksgiving feast of their own.

The accompanying illustration showed the cooked Pilgrims and Indians, who looked just like cooked turkeys, except the Pilgrims all had Pilgrim hats, and the Indians all had little mohawks on them, and the turkeys were tearing off drumsticks and making satisfied "YUM YUM" sounds as they ate.

I thought it was both amusing and poetic justice. It was clarified for me that the school staff and administration disagreed.

It was emphasized to me that no one was Judging me (which, of course, meant that they were), but rather, that they were merely Concerned about my state of mind.

They became much more Concerned when I turned eight years old, and started writing stories for my third-grade teacher about Ronald Reagan riding an MX missile hobby-horse, while me and Konstantin Chernenko ate Doritos and watched cartoons on the couch together.

Guess which decade I grew up in. And yes, I knew who guys like Chernenko and Andrei Gromyko were when I was in grade school.