I was sitting out on vacation and saw an interaction. I was viewing this interaction and I had a strange conviction. The conviction converted the interaction into composition.
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WHEN NUMBERS GET SERIOUS
I am now an old man. I don’t say that ironically. When I celebrated my birthday last Thursday, my daughter put all 71 candles on the cake. My grandson, who is nine, dressed up like a firefighter. “Just in case,” he said. I blew out a majority of the candles, which is all that is required by law, and then everyone else helped. I mention my age not because I am proud, certainly not because I am ashamed, but because 71 puts me in mind of 44, since the 7 is 3 + 4 and the 1 is just a 1 and the 3 can go to the 1 and the 4 can stay a 4 and meet another one. It’s the way my mind works. Always has. it seeks out patterns in numbers. That’s probably why I was a good math student, why I kept studying it in college, why I stayed in academics, I was mentioned more than once (but less than three times) as a possible Abel Prize recipient. Never won. Or should I say that the number of times I won is the kernel of the identity homomorphism minus itself? The Euler characteristic of an odd-dimensional sphere? My grandson would say I shoudn’t. My daughter would say I shouldn’t. My wife, were she still around, would say I should. She was my greatest supporter. That’s why when I think of 71, I think of not only of 44 but also of the 51 that 44 can easily become, as 44 is 4 * 11 and then the 4 can slide over in place value, taking a ten spot not a one, and add itself to the 11. Also it is two decades ago, on the dot. That, 51, was the year we were having trouble. Alice would have capitalized: not capitalized upon it, but written it that way, The Year We Were Having Trouble, to make a mockument of it. That was one of her words and she used it stubbornly. A mockument was a strategy for taking something that was already significant, usually something uneasy-making, and giving it comically large import to lessen its weight. The Year We Were etcetera started on a porch at a country store on a vacation. I was getting coffee for myself. Alice was at home sleeping. Our daughter Melissa was in an energetic phase, backpacking with friends the summer after college, and she had kept us up late with what was for her an early-morning phone call from Picos de Europa. Alice couldn’t sleep afterwards, so much hope for the young mind and soul that had been the baby in her arms. I slept fairly well. The morning was foggy. A little girl was two seats down from me. She was playing with an origami shape, crushing the tips down. Soon she was joined by a young blonde woman I surmised was her mother. My surmise was confirmed. “Oh, daughter of mine,” she said. The two of them talked for a bit and then the mother turned to me. “I like your shoes,” she said. I looked down to see which ones I was wearing. They were bright green, originally chartreuse. I was not prepared for a compliment, and even less prepared for one from an attractive young blonde woman who, I now noticed, wore very short shorts. I thanked her and made an idle joke. “Not mine,” I said. “Stolen from some guy at the gym. But thank you.” I wanted a laugh and a fare-thee-well. I got the first half of that. The second half blew up into The Year. A 4 can stay a 4 and meet another one. Alice and I weathered the events of that strange summer and the stranger fall that followed, during which I did things I had never done, creeping across lawns in bare feet, hiding in hall closets, copulating in cars. A giddiness entered the air. It made things hectic and heated, though it is hard to say for certain whether it made them worse. “This is time passing,” Alice used to say. Once I apologized to her and she shook her head. “I think that’s a stupid thing to tell me,” she said. “You are doing what you want, which gives it some value. It’s not what I want, which takes some of the value away. Use your math. It’s not killing us. It’ll pass. Just get to that point already.” She was right, as always. The young mother went on her way soon enough, as one does when one has a fantastically wealthy husband and not even that much quarrel with him, just a little boredom and (as she said) “an itch under the hemline.” Alice and I went back to time passing, our own time. She sometimes tweaked me about my weakness and sometimes cried on her own, which I knew because she moved tissue boxes around the house. It didn’t kill us. But something did: ten years after the Year, ten years before now, she went down into the icy waters of cancer. Her eyes stayed so bright until the end. The 71 candles that conflagrated Thursday did not make my eyes half as bright as hers were every day. I would die today if I thought I had materially dimmed them. I am guilty as a killer but also I take her words to heart. What I think I mean to say is frustratingly elusive. I far prefer numbers to words. What I think I mean to say is that you can love different people differently, some with body, some with mind, that you can take events in your life and process them with your rational mind while, all along, the rest of your mind works in secret. What I mean to say is that life is a plot with characters, or that you are a character constantly in search of plot. An old mathematician is perhaps not a reliable source of wisdom. Good. I wish only to age at a fair rate and join Alice in infinite-dimensional space, maybe Hilbert, maybe Banach, and we’ll see about the convergence of Cauchy sequences. Is this possible? Is it farcical? Who can say? I have not yet gone down into the icy water, but now and then I feel a chill all over. [©2025 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]