Life is filled with lots of things. Words, emotions and
reactions all come to mind. And then there are numbers. They seem to be
important, too.
We all want our team to be number 1.
Apparently, if you can dance, it takes 2 to tango but an
unlimited number can form a conga line.
Most kids begin school by the age of 6.
When you go to school you have to learn math and math seems
fairly reliant on numbers. Well, some may say it did until common core.
You age from 12 into 13 and that means a whole new world
opens up called the teenage years.
You have to be age 16 in most states to legally drive a car.
Become 17 and you can serve our country in the military but
you can’t vote in an election until you are 18.
Become 21 and you can legally do some stuff you would get in
trouble for if your age was determined to be a number less than that such as 20.
When you are 25 you can multiply that number by 2 and get a number
associated with a half-century.
A half-century equals 50 and when you hit that milepost,
AARP begins sending you mail reminding you the number you associate with your
age keeps climbing upward.
Some retire from work at 62.
Some retire from work at 65.
Some never retire no matter the number they associate with
their age because they consider age as just a number.
Sometimes you have to stand in line and, yes, take a number.
You wait where you are until your number is called.
Once your number is called you get to move forward but
sometimes the wait for your number to be called is long and frustrating.
Maybe that wait time is why Bob Seger once sang that he “felt
like a number”.
Odds are the long wait for your number to be called wasn’t
as long as you imagined but odds are just a series of numbers based on the probability
of something happening.
Some people are addicted to looking at the odds and then
playing the numbers. Of course, someone so interested in this usually has money
at stake.
We measure how much money we have in the bank by looking at
numbers on a piece of paper and hope we don’t have a minus sign in front of
that overall number.
The actual money we use is designated by numbers also. The
bill with George Washington’s image on it has a value of 1 and so on.
The government printing our money knows who we are because
at some point they assigned a string of 9 numbers to our name to keep track
of us instead of using our given names. Of course, these days they track us
other ways also. Some of those ways probably involve numbers.
Speaking of government, we elect our leaders by voting and
then counting those votes with the agreement that the person with the most
votes—the highest number--after all that counting wins which basically means we,
as a country, as states and as communities are electing the most popular people
and not necessarily the most capable people to make decisions about our lives. We
do this in spite of the fact that we raise our children to not be concerned
with being popular.
Sorry, we were talking about numbers weren’t we?
You can call me locally by punching out 7 numbers on your
phone in a certain specific order.
If you are outside my area code, you can add 4 other numbers,
a 1 plus 3 numbers called an area code, to those 7 numbers and try calling me
then. Sorry, no collect calls.
If you have no success with the 11 numbers used to try to
call me, you can end the call then push the number 0 on your phone to see if an
operator can help you reach me. You can sweet talk the operator but I still won’t
accept your collect call, so don’t even try.
When I am at my job, you can pick up your phone and reach me
at my workplace with a different set of numbers in a different but specific order.
My office at work is even designated with a series of numbers
on the wall, 206B these days.
Want to come visit us at home? Make sure to take that particular
highway with numbers associated with it. At a certain point, you will need to turn
on the street that begins with 4 numbers. Once you are on that street count 4
houses on the left and there we are, house number 5. There’s 1 mailbox out
front with those 4 numbers associated with our street on it as a reminder. Speaking
of the mailbox, if you need to mail us something make sure to use those four
numbers with our street name plus our city and state to get it to us. And don’t
forget those 5 numbers at the very end called the zip code.
Anyway, if you get here, you will find me, my wife and my
daughter. That makes 3 of us. If you count our cat Daisy, then there are 4 of
us. We love Daisy but don’t be shocked if she won’t like you. She’s probably
not concerned with numbers too much either.
We mark off our time with numbers also. What time is it you
ask? Look at the clock with 12 numbers and 2 hands and calculate, formulate and
cipher to come up with a number that represents the approximate time it is. You
may have to look out the window to determine if it’s daytime or nighttime
though.
After the clock runs its circuit 2 times during 12 hours then
it starts all over again. We take these 24 hour increments and call
them days. We distinguish each day with a different number, 1 through 31 and
then these numbers are lined up 7 to a row called weeks and these weeks fill
out in columns to make a month. Get 12 months and you make 1 year. Then we place
all these numbers, days, weeks and months into a calendar to mark the passing
of time.
And a year marks the overall passing of these days, weeks
and months and is a set of four numbers that passes only after that certain 365
days, 52 weeks and 12 months have consecutively passed. Of course, every 4 years
it takes 1 extra day, or 366 of those, to push forward a year.
Why all the talk about numbers? To show in some strange way how
we measure things sometimes. For instance, with this particular post this blog
has had 100 postings. The first post was in 2008. 99 others have followed since
then over the course of 6 years. Some posts have been great; others should have
never seen the light of day. Still, many of you have spent some of your time
reading the ramblings of a man muddling through life with his family alongside
and provided support and encouragement. Thank you for all that. I really do
appreciate it. Your good words and thoughts make you number 1 with me.
