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11.14.01
I've never much cared for math. It doesn't seem to care much for me, either. Several years ago, my checkbook register was an interesting study in intuition. Balances (if they were entered at all) were rounded up and down willy-nilly to avoid the nasty addition and subtraction of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. More often than not, actual hard totals were replaced by tiny notes--"Target, May 11, probably $40 because I never get out of Target without spending less than $40" or "Safeway--I think $50-ish but maybe more like $70-ish"--but mostly I just carried around in my head a vague idea of how much money I had on any day. Why sweat the details? That's what the banks (in whom I blindly and absolutely trust) are for.
Enter Bob, who balances the checkbook every day in the same way a person might have their morning cup of coffee or brush their teeth. He is miserably unhappy until he knows for certain, every day, that we're solvent. Allowances are doled out weekly, and my purse is full of envelopes of cash for groceries, gas, and personal spending. Gone are the days when my heart skipped during the suspenseful pause while the money machine decided whether or not to give me money. Nowadays, there is always money there, it's just that I'm not supposed to touch it.
Why? Why? It's there! Spend it! If Bob is reading this, he will not smile.
Maybe the math I don't like is just the arithmetic, because I associate all arithmetic with denial and lack of fun -- pinch those pennies, burn those calories, count those fat grams, cringe at the numbers on that scale. Maybe I'd like the theoretical stuff. My friend Henry makes it all sound so elegant:
One day, someone will draw a correlation between 1.618 and e (increasingly one of my favorite numbers), and I'll have a new hero. E is not just a mathematical convenience or simply the natural log base, but recurs as a special ratio in nature and physics. My guess is that its meaning in other aspects of Creation are probably just waiting to be discovered.
That's something I could actually get excited about, if I knew what it meant. Another friend makes emotional attachment to numbers sound as perfectly reasonable as having a favorite football team:
E is a good number, but in my opinion nothing beats 3.14159 or p.
I don't have a favorite number. Am I missing something? Why aren't numbers my friend? I don't even like how they look -- rigid and inflexible. You take a 3, you take a 4, and there are only two ways you can arrange them, and only two things they can signify. Once I was 34, and some day I will be 43.
Now take two letters: M and E. Em can be Auntie Em, or a nickname for Emily Dickinson, or a sound you make when you don't know what else to say . . . all kinds of things. As for Me -- it means something completely different depending on who is saying it.
Even writing letters is more fun, because you can print, or use cursive, or all caps . . . but there is no cursive 5 or 9 or 2. Letters are flexible, entertaining, funny, and charming. I love letters.
I do have a favorite number poem. At one point in my childhood I actually had it memorized:
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.
Arithmetic tells you how many you lose or win if you know how many you had before you lost or won.
Arithmetic is seven eleven all good children go to heaven-or five six bundles of sticks.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky -- or the answer is wrong and you have to start all over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
If you take a number and double it and double it again and then double it a few more times, the number gets bigger and bigger and goes higher and higher and only arithmetic can tell you what the number is when you decide to quit doubling.
Arithmetic is where you have to multiply-and you carry the multiplication table in your head and hope you won't lose it.
If you have two animal crackers, one good and one bad, and you eat one and a striped zebra with streaks all over him eats the other, how many animal crackers will you have if somebody offers you five six seven and you say No no no and you say Nay nay nay and you say Nix nix nix?
If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is better in arithmetic, you or your mother?
--Carl Sandburg
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