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9.9 It Counts

We should not even comment on the unique number of the day. In fact, I haven't heard that much about it today. But I just can't help myself.

Number nine does not seem to have that much bad juju attached to it. It's certainly nothing like poor old six or thirteen. (Three is pretty good, and here we have three of them four times over.) Still, there's something cool about four nines on the edge - just before they flip over into four zeros and a one. But the calendar isn't an odometer, so tomorrow is not sleek and fascinating10000 but only the odd-looking 91099.

Fun with numbers...I never had much. Maybe if I'd had the Queen of Math at some point, but she was a child when I was a child - no chance. I think it all went wrong around third or fourth grade. I don't remember the particular teacher, day or trauma, but it happened because I came out of hating hating hating numbers. Why? There was something I couldn't or didn't get. From that point on math became a foreign language (I'd have trouble with that, too, later on.)

My aversion to numbers was so strong that I decided early on to choose no career that required them. At one time I wanted to be a carpenter, but all that measuring nixed those plans. Then I thought archaeology might be nice...until I learned of all the science (i.e. really weird numbers) required. Is it any wonder I turned to reading and writing?

I was so dense in high school that I actually signed up for four straight years of math when we only needed three to graduate. Nobody ever told me. My most memorable and oddly likeable high school experience in this area involved Fr. Edwin McGowan's legendary sophomore geometry class. I will not get into those stories here. We liked him despite/because of the mild abuse, the W.C.Fields demeanor, the extravagantly wrinkled Carmelite habit.

At Marquette I squeaked through the one required course and figured my formal math education had ended. I did not forsee that thirteen years later I would be signing on to a graduate-level course involving Euclid and Lobachevsky. The faculty and program of St. John's College at Santa Fe had seduced me into a variety of impossible situations through which I discovered the possible. My math tutorial met four mornings a week throughout the summer of 1986. It was led by physicist, novelist, aesthetic philosopher, poet Charles Bell... another legendary figure among those who know. This course, taken at the age of 36, dissolved most of my irrational (?) fear of numbers (rational and otherwise). Mr. Bell helped me to see that math was a rich, human thing...a powerful tool for the extension of mind out into matter.

I'm still no wizard when it comes to figuring. I bless the kind folks who developed grading software to perform those toxic computations throughout the school year. I pity the sad creatures (pale souls) who obsess over the fine points of their own numerical grades. I'm pleased to announce that as I approach the half-century mark, the numbers have not done me in.

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