Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Numbers have always held a special fascination with me. I am not sure why I was blessed/cursed with this. Even before proper schooling the pattern and rhythm of numbers often came to the forefront of my thoughts; albeit, it was not always in the ways my father would have enjoyed. When I was a child, preschool if I remember, I took an orange crayon and wrote on virtually every conceivable surface of our house the numerical sequence, 7 x 7 = 77. Not mathematically correct, mind you, but it had a certain symmetry both in a physical sense and in a rhyming sense. It was shortly after this that my father started using addition/multiplication flash cards with me to help develop my skills. Maybe he saw a twinkling of an innate mathematical ability or maybe he was just worried that I would continue along the path of mathematical mayhem of using graphic symmetry to reach a scientific conclusion instead of using empirical data.

As a student, I was never at the top of my class, it just wasn’t one of those goals I strived for. I always did well enough, but certainly not up to the standards that I was always told I could achieve scholastically. When confronted with those pesky IQ tests, on the whole they didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it was also an opportunity for those patterns and rhythms of numbers to help me out. Nestled in those questions of “what number follows in this sequence” or “which set does not belong”, I was always able to easily see what was next or out of place. Not that it helped me out a lot, it just gave those people who said I just needed to work harder to achieve the goals they set for me. Now, after a reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, I can now attribute my middling success at school to my birthdate. Being an October baby I was brought into the educational system almost a full year before my fellow students. To put it bluntly, my brain just wasn’t up to snuff when I started school.

The other day I started to think about the days of the year that bear significance to people. You might question first of all why in the world would I even think of writing an article about the number of important days in a life. Well, it does reflect back on my affinity for numbers, but more importantly it was the birth of our great niece on March 8. I started to think that perhaps a year ago to Alicia and Joey (the parents), March 8 was just another day in the year. One that would roll on by without a second thought. But now, just a year later it is one of the most important days in their lives. A day they will chronicle and remember until their last breath. I have always enjoyed bringing a little morbidity to joyous occasions.

As an infant, days really had no meaning to me, in fact the singularly most important day of my life, my birthday didn't even register until it was programmed into me. My world was happy just to be filled with a dry diaper and a wet breast. Days had no bearing unless there was an opportunity to wake somebody up when I wanted attention. This began to slowly change. Like most children, as I grew older there were only a few days in the year that meant anything to me at all. Those in particular were my birthday and Christmas, soon thereafter Hallowe’en was added to the mix. All the rest of days just sort of circulated around the Big Three, my own personal Holy Trinity. I eagerly anticipated each one with the next one quickly focused on no matter how far advanced it was.

But as I started to grow older, I started to collect days that became part of what formed me. Easter soon loomed, not for the religious aspect as most people would like to believe. No, it was for candy. Then as I got in school, Valentine’s Day and all the cinnamon hearts. So you see, gifts and candy really earmarked my important days. As I became less self-centred (the snickering you just heard was my wife), I began to celebrate other members of my family with their birthday. I was never that comfortable about giving at that point, but I did recognize their own days. By this point I now had 10 days dedicated out of 365. Then Labour Day became a touchstone for it signaled the end of summer and the slogging back to the books. New Years for the parties and the dawning of another year. Thanksgiving for family time and so on and so on, they keep piling on as years go by.

As we all progress through life, important dates are added to our calendar like charms on a bracelet or links on a ball and chain, it depends on your particular slant on life. Birth dates, weddings, funerals, holidays, anniversaries, death dates and monumental historical dates keep adding up. Sometimes they are significant, sometimes not as much so. In my own personal inventory, “International Talk Like A Pirate Day” (September 19) and the “Star Wars Day” (May 4; May the fourth be with you) hold almost an equal stature to that of the definitely in need of a new name, Civic Holiday. I did a quick calculation and came up with about 48 dates in the yearly calendar that hold some significance to me and I am not really that old yet. Well, old in the big scheme of things. The great irony is that as you get older and all these dates are collected and begin to seriously accumulate, in all likelihood your memory is fading and you start to forget them. This takes us back full circle to only one date that is important to you and that is a date you will never remember. The day you die. Isn’t that pleasant.