Numbers: short-shorts on a theme

 
Niner Niner 49er, I was born in the year of California 1949, 9/9/49. It meant the world to me. This was 100 years after Californians successfully sought statehood. What else might this all mean? When I was 9, I began listening to transistor radio, all for sports, San Francisco Giants baseball and San Francisco 49ers football. The sports magic began with my elementary school friend, Tom, even though he didn’t listen to sports much. But I liked him because he could draw comics and illustrate stories. And his father liked sports, a lot. It was always better at Tom’s house since he had 3 brothers and 2 sisters. His older sister, yes! And better snacks: fresh bakery white bread in the deep bread drawer. One day up at Tom’s, I walked by his dad on the landing, John Christian Weaver, M.D.. What was he eating? I asked Tom who whispered, “Peanut butter and pimento sandwich.” Pimento? With peanut butter? Would my dad eat that? Other times I’d seen Dr. Weaver eating a banana, and both times he was holding a transistor radio. This day he was angry, muttering under his breath and sandwich, “Damned Rams, 49ers lose again!” I’ve never stopped rooting for the Niners.
    - Alan Bern


It’s 1970. I’m in a Yorkshire village called Muker, walking to the post office, when an old man sitting on a nearby wall beckons me over. He asks me how old I think he is. He looked really old but, figuring an honest answer might appear rude I say that I don’t know. He delightedly announces that he’s 94; that drinking the water from Muker beck is what keeps him young. I’ve seen the Caddisfly larvae that live under its stones and I can’t say I’m tempted. Most of my 1970 is lost but what he tells me next is clear as day. He says that when he was about my age he shook hands with a man who was as old as he is now, a man who fought at the Battle of Waterloo. And, with that, he puts his hand out for me to shake. I remember, back at the caravan, taking my notepad out. I wrote 1815 first then 1970 then 94 and I worked it all out on paper: in the sixth month of 1970 I shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who fought at the Battle of Waterloo.
    - Alan Peat


In the game of numbers, she was 28 and I was 1. Now I'm 57, she's been gone for 19 years, she was 66. Not sure how it all adds up, but I know somehow it does and the love remains. Cheers to you, mom.
    - Amy E.  Bartell


Everything that ever happened to me as a child happened when I was ten. Ten was when I kicked in the plate glass window and had to spend a month in the yard, alone. Ten was when my father made the adjustable wooden hurdle and we all worked at jumping higher and higher. Ten was when the new beagle, Toby, spent his first night in the house because there was a thunderstorm and he chewed the arm of the newly upholstered chair. Ten was when I got a maroon button-down collared shirt with matching socks for my birthday. Ten was when I first knew the magic of a Moravian Lovefeast. Ten was when my grandmother sat on her brown sofa, me beside her, singing hymns late into the night. Ten was when I fell off the downed tree, pretending it was a balance beam, hitting my cheek and leaving a scab the size of half my face. Ten was when I got a shiny blue English bike for Christmas and made it into my pet and my best friend. Ten was when I first tried to grasp the idea of infinity.
    - Ann Carter


At dusk the blackout curtains were drawn and stayed closed until dawn so I never saw moonrise or counted the stars as they came out. Now it was suppertime and then bedtime. I was allowed to read for fifteen minutes before turning out my light. It was hard to fall asleep because at night air raids happened with lots of bombs dropping. One time I woke in the middle of the night being carried downstairs into the basement air raid shelter. Down there we still heard the bombs fall. How close were they — two streets away? The far side of the main road, or on the long path into the big park? The peacocks in the zoo screamed and we counted the screams — eight that time, I said. We never knew the number of hours we'd be down there. We guessed the time — two o'clock? No, three thirty. Didn't matter, the time was always a long time until the All Clear sirens wailed. They wailed forever, too long to count the minutes. We went back upstairs. I counted the stairs, all twelve of them . . . hoping it was breakfast time.
    - Antonia Matthew


My first telephone number is emblazoned deeply in my mind: Linden 3–3033. There’s something so comforting in the memory of it. One day in grade school, the teacher asked us for our numbers. When my turn came around, I proudly recited it, the special number with so many threes. One day, I answered the dial phone on our hallway table and the caller asked, “What is the name of the famous clock in London?” I was only seven or eight and clammed up at being put on the spot by a strange voice. I quickly hung up. I didn’t tell my mother about the call. Maybe she entered a contest and would have won something big if not for me. This was yet another secret of my childhood that I carried for a long time. But then, maybe I saved her from some kind of scam or sales pitch. As suburbia expanded, new telephone exchanges were introduced. Our original number, with the name of the town and sonorous threes, was changed into digits: 486-3033. Then area codes came along, and random numbers with no elegance whatsoever were added. The poetry of phone numbers disappeared forever. 
    - Barrie Levine


Second grade: numbers lined up on the page like dancing cockroaches. Eraser smudges and coal-black ink. I can still see white pages of subtraction problems, punishing me every day, until my head ached. By grade four, I had quit doing math. On the last week of school, my workbook was still mostly empty. Mrs. Ferguson called my mother who decided the only solution was to do all the math problems herself. (What a relief!) My sixth grade teacher, Roberta Pangborn, was an angel. I mean, really an angel, wearing the same clean, pressed, and starched, pink dress every day. In spite of my obvious math deficiency, she placed me in the highest level of 7th grade with all the smart kids. That changed my life. My self esteem soared. Math became superfluous, just something I had to suffer through or ignore, like algebra one and two. Geometry was okay because I could see it. Higher math was like god, I could believe in it, or not. My choice. I chose to write poems.
    - Carole Johnston


Four decades ago, on a business trip to San Antonio, I networked with others in the adoption field. I learned children in foster care were profiled on cable television in Georgia. On the flight home, I drafted a proposal and ultimately pitched the three major networks in Boston about profiling older and special needs children with the goal of finding permanent, loving families. I selected the CBS affiliate, WBZ-TV 4, for “Wednesday’s Child,” and the rest is history. The series, hosted by news anchor Jack Williams, captured two presidential awards and was replicated nationally. As communications director for the Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange, I worked with social workers and staff at residences to identify children, develop scripts, and select activities and locations for our film crew each week. Wednesday evenings, I answered incoming calls. The series increased public awareness of adoption issues and found permanent families for 85 percent of the children profiled. Jack Williams frequently spoke about the program and always testified as to how the series changed his life, too. WBZ-TV 4 hosted the “Walk 4 Wednesday’s Child” for many years and Jack personally hosted a “Ski Race 4 Wednesday’s Child” for years at Waterville Valley, raising much-needed funds.
    - Deborah Burke Henderson


A friend needs the last four digits of my phone for Venmo and I nearly send her the last four of my social. 1101. 1348. 1612. 1650. 1734. 1825. 2130. 3412. 4004. 4706. 9227. Phone number. Post office box number. Campus box number. Home address and work addresses — old and new. Club house code, cell phone code, garage door code, ATM code. Not necessarily in that order. Definitely not in that order. Numbers here may be changed for security reasons. Or not. Psych! Once, I stayed at a writer’s retreat in far north Minnesota. For two weeks, no keys, no locks, not a single code. What would life feel like if we could trust everyone, all the time?
    - Ellen Orleans


69. That’s the age when my father passed away. It happened on a Sunday, in a hospital. Lung cancer. When he breathed I remember I could hear a murmuration of starlings coming from inside his chest. I'm still sorry I wasn't with him in his last moments. I would have held his hand and told him that I would take care of my mother. We would have remembered the days when we went fishing together, the way I caught a few crayfish for the first time. Another time I sat on his shoulders and stretched my hands toward the stars; believing him to be Atlas, I was trying to touch a constellation. From now on I'll look for him among the stars and tell him that everything is almost fine — that I'm starting to look more and more like him, my mother actually says that; that I'm getting old, my wife thinks this; that I'm getting more and more unbearable, my son invents this; that I can't stand winter anymore because of the cold that makes its nest in the bone marrow. 69 is the milestone at which my father's heart stopped on earth and went on to beat somewhere in the sky.
    - Florin C. Ciobica


My mother has moved to a nursing home. After a lifetime of good health, at 91, her body and mind have suddenly changed course. Regrettably, we have found ourselves canceling her apartment lease and giving away her furniture, household goods, and many of her clothes. It’s been a gloomy job, but perhaps saddest of all was the most unexpected: the act of turning off her phone line — a phone number she has had for 70 years. The number was originally assigned in the early 1950s, when my parents bought their first home, a tiny two-bedroom on top of a hill.  A party line with an ‘AR-’ exchange (later changed to ‘27’), it served both my parent’s house and the neighbor next door. While shared party lines — with their ease for informative and entertaining eavesdropping — became obsolete in the 1960s, the phone number did not; it travelled with my parents from household to household with each subsequent move. Now, though, the phone and phone number are gone, as is much of my mother’s ability to remember the past. Despite the profound memory loss, to our delight — and hers — she still easily recalls that phone number first used seven decades ago: AR2-6160!
    - Jim Mazza


Growing up, before multitasking was a word, I embraced its forerunner — the three-ring circus. Elephants on the right, acrobats to the left, and clowns in the center. Last week I faced a new sort of circus — a three-ring crisis. While caring for my ill daughter and worrying about my husband’s biopsy results I put aside the center ring pains in my left hand, pain caused by three rings, one never removed for forty years, two not having made it over the knuckle for twenty years. When my wedding ring finger turned purple one night, I soaked it in icy water until it turned pink again. The next day, I called a local jeweler. Snip, snip, snip with a special cutter and my finger, though still with marks on it, could breathe free again. My daughter is now recovering from her surgery. My husband’s biopsy was negative. And I have learned that one act at a time is best for focus, and even when there is action in all three, I need to spend time on that center ring, since you cannot pour into others from an empty pitcher. No more three ring crises.
    - Joan Leotta


10:10 p.m. I think, but I’m not sure. This is the time I was born but it’s not on my birth certificate . . . it’s just what my parents told me when I was very young. I do not remember the conversation. I just remember the time. 10:10. So neat. So symmetrical. Such an even number and I usually hate even numbers. Yet every other day or so, I find myself looking at the clock at exactly 10:10 and it always excites me and I always have to shout it out to whoever is in earshot. “It’s 10:10!!!” Even if I’m all alone, I am compelled to yell, “It’s 10:10! I am born! I am alive! I am here!”
    - Judy Cogan


1 Apostles’ Creed, 5 decades with 1 Our Father, 10 Hail Marys & 1 Glory Be each. Saying the Rosary was an exercise in mathematics as well as an exercise in meditation. It required concentration — and that was the point — but when the Rosary was recited by 7 women from St. Timothy’s Altar & Rosary Society kneeling in my mother’s living room, it was even harder to keep my mind on each bead as it moved through my small fingers. And I know Mother was having difficulty concentrating, too. She was hoping the dust bunnies had been cleared from under the sofa where Mrs. Yacabucci was kneeling. She was hoping that I’d done a good job polishing the piano bench where Mrs. McCorkle was resting her upper body, obviously tired from dealing with 2 sets of twins. Mother was also thinking about the 2 pans of cinnamon rolls in the oven, pleased with the delicious smell, but hoping the Rosary would be over before they burned. She really wanted to serve them warm with cups of 8 O’Clock coffee, which she knew to be Mrs. Yawarsky’s favorite, having talked about it when they ran into each other at the A&P.  I was kneeling next to Mother by the stand that held the Boston fern and where she could keep an eye on me and make sure my back was upright, as was prescribed. When, at last, the final Glory Be had been said, the sighs of 7 women and 1 little girl were prayers of a different kind. Gratitude, perhaps?    
    - Kathleen Kramer


Strings of numbers come to me sometimes at night, to have the last say on dream sequences I already didn’t understand. Yes, Pythagoras said the world’s built around numbers, but surely the dream architects remember I was an English major, therefore allergic to math. Last night, after I worked at a Catholic high school run by openminded nuns and priests — and sat in their big domed wooden church — and after sleeping in a room with twenty-odd people, who kept giving me toddlers so I could calm them to sleep — and once, a Scottish terrier to soothe — and after I went out to the hall with a man who also couldn’t sleep and wanted to trade ideas — the first number that arrived was 1, which seems appropriate: start at the beginning. Also, Three Dog Night told me while I grew up an only child that one is the loneliest number. The next integer, my birthday (26) also made sense. After that, I am at a loss. The last was 57. Heinz varieties? The age of Prince, Chaucer, and Stokely Carmichael at death? But no, it’s probably more like Bruce Springsteen’s song title, as applied to my dreamlife: “57 Channels and Nothing On.”
    - Laurinda Lind


Numbers. There are so many kinds: natural, whole, imaginary, real. For me, almost all numbers are complex and irrational. My struggle with numbers began in the fourth grade after my teacher recommended that I move up to the highest math group. “Marcie needs a challenge,” she said. And math certainly challenged me — to the point of tears most nights. Now at fifty-one, you’d think I wouldn’t cry over numbers anymore, but I’m a “word” person. At least, that’s what my friend Jenny would tell you. She was the “numbers” person, the one I’d call for help when I couldn’t get my “cookie numbers” to balance out during Girl Scout cookie season. Calm, logical, Jenny was someone I could count on to help me figure things out, even when she was struggling with difficult numbers of her own — like stage four breast cancer and stage two brain cancer. It’s February now, which means it’s “cookie season” again. And here I am, on my own without Jenny to help me, face-to-face with a bunch of numbers that don’t add up. Six years of cancer treatment plus three months on hospice equals one death two days before last Thanksgiving. Forty-nine, it turns out, is the most irrational number of all.
    - Marcie Wessels


When sand dollars were plentiful I watched them glide in on the surf, throwing back the live ones to ride in yet again. Days when a little boy rode the surf, face alight with joy, turning, board under one arm, ready to paddle back into the waves for just one more ride. Hundreds of sand dollars, hundreds of rides. I scattered his ashes in that same surf, walking the beach one day after another watching for just one more sand dollar, rare now, to glide onto the sand like proof of one last ride that never came. One surfboard gathers dust in the corner … forever.
    - Margaret Walker


Rest stop towards Gallup — I buy an Acoma pot from the potter. Her wares are on a blanketed table in the parking lot. I pay $80.00, a very fair price. I say: “Almost 40 years ago my mom bought me a large pot from Acoma Pueblo.” I show her the size with my hands. I don’t tell her my mom spent $250.00 which in those days represented a fortune to me. She did not offer me rent or car repair money, but I didn’t mind. The pot is still gorgeous, painted with 2 earth-toned birds. “That’s worth a lot today,” the potter says. “Is it signed?” I nod. She wraps up the new pot. It is small, a seed pot with just a tiny hole at the top, painted in free-drawn converging lines. I take the package, walk away, and burst into tears. My father bought Acoma pots on their honeymoon. My mother, often a mean person, did give me a present. I’m almost 70 years old. The potter wears her graying hair tied back. Her face shows both worry and calm, not unlike my own in the mirror. The tax is a bit more than $6.00.
    - Miriam Sagan


The count down starts and restarts . . . 10, 9, 8 . . . pause . . . explanations for the delay come over the airways from Cape Kennedy. Stomachs go tight. Rockets can indeed explode. After all, just 35 years ago, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just over a minute after liftoff, killing all 7 crew members, including civilian schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, horrifying all of us watching on TV. How many times did we wonder over the years if they burned to death or did death come instantaneously. Right now my husband, a friend, and I are sharing an oceanfront condo in Daytona Beach, only 75 miles north of Cape Kennedy and we’ll get to see the rocket’s flare in giant technicolor. We press out onto the balcony again as the count restarts and goes to Lift Off! We feel we’re bare inches from the rocket as it passes us, goosebumps on our arms, this time carrying everyone safely into the far black yonder.
     - Pris Campbell


At 110 Snyder Hill Road there’s an old Cornell barn with the peeling yellow paint of the ancient Ag School barns. There aren’t too many left, maybe Cornell has other plans for the land the old barns sit on? I almost feel like volunteering to help paint those old barns. The one on Snyder Hill and Pine Tree has other modern barns around it but the sheep that moved in last fall are in that sweet old barn, on the ground floor with a hay story above it. You can see the outside hardware where a “hayfork” track begins at the ridge top, part of the pulley system to put loose hay into barns before hay-baling, back in the years of farming with horses. Mostly, 110 Snyder Hill Road is for Cornell horses now, a changing bunch of beautiful horses including polo ponies. These horses are my neighbors. Especially in summer I am likely to be within hailing distance as I walk by, sometimes certain horses and I talk a little bit. It’s quite a feeling when a horse is happy to see you. 
    - Tina Wright


On my twentieth birthday Dimitrius played the mouth harp. In serpentine silence the revelers followed along the cliffs of the island Hydra. “Did you say dance?” he asked. We leapt and twirled under the cool February night sky, oblivious to the repressive Regime of Colonels across the gulf in Athens. His song rose like a smoke signal to the Convent of the Sacred Mothers who were making lace inside the clouds on the mountain above us. Dimitrius, wearing a crown of curly hair, scooped up a jellyfish with one hand and smiled into my camera: victorious youth! We partied through the night, feasting, swimming, dancing, singing songs censored by mainland monsters, the island a haven of amnesic joyfulness. We grapevined our way to the crescent-shaped harbor where the balm of the lemon trees and the calm of sleeping fishing boats greeted us. On my twentieth birthday, across the gulf, my future lover Fotis packed his body into the trunk of a car and escaped Athens, all the while on Hydra, filled with cake and youthful optimism, Demetrius and his followers forgot for one night that the dictator Papadopoulas was on the prowl.
    - Yvette Rubio


The French toast was all runny, with threads of white gunk dripping off the bread. “I can’t eat this,” I told Mom, “it’s too eggy.” She told me I couldn’t get up from the table until I finished every bite and then she said I should stop whining. (So unfair.) I sat there, but I didn’t eat. Instead, I cut the bread into itty bitty squares, neat incisions, this way and that. Then I counted the squares. There were 12 little squares of French toast. I looked down at the plate. I looked some more. And at that moment a bell went off inside my head. Ding, ding, ding. I understood everything. 3 x 4 = 12. 4 x 3 = 12. Coming and going, it was still 12. Up and down, it was still 12. The mystery of multiplication was revealed to me in the French toast. I wanted to shout out to Mom and let her know what I discovered. But also, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. “Stop whining,” she’d said, and I wasn’t even doing that. So I stayed right there at the kitchen table, all alone, thinking my very smart thoughts, keeping my little burst of genius to myself.
    - Zee Zahava