Down for the count

In my day, kids didn’t have cell phones, interns or robot pets to help them pass the time. Things were simpler, less automated, and involved a great deal more vitamin D. Back then, I was forced to face up to my own mortality every afternoon by going outside to play. While leaving the house was fraught with paranoia and fear, after a little prodding, it became preferable to enduring the raucous jingle of Barney the Purple Dinosaur, constantly emanating from neighborhood TV sets. I had to escape. 

Some kids dug holes, others swung tree branches, but me? I took to hopping for hours on a pogo stick. It gave me something productive to do. Like treading water, skilled technicians of the practice do it as if their life depended on it. Because in some ways, it did. Falling was always a possibility. You could land on the errant acorn left by an aggrieved squirrel, despondent over another subpart winter of diminishing fruits.

I’d bounce and bounce. However, the act itself wasn’t particularly fulfilling. So in those early jumps, I would do something else that increased the degree of difficulty. Like say, drink a homemade Arnold Palmer or silently recite William Blake’s best work. Soon though, that left me cold, too. 

I had to count my hops. There weren't many other options. Otherwise, there was no way to assess my progress. It was easy in the beginning. I’d count and count and eventually jump off. After daily practice, my proficiency predictably went up. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Of course, this is also where I began to lose count. 

Too often, something would happen to distract me. The squeal of a distant car horn. The shriek of a dissonant baby. The scream of a discordant bird. While I was rarely greeted by this trifecta all at once, even one such example would send me flying into the tall glass. At around twelve or thirteen thousand, I reached my limit both spiritually and arithmetically. Initially, I tried to regain my composure and account for my slip ups. Then I stopped caring, realizing that the joy of bouncing had been taken from me by my commitment to such precise mathematical tyranny. I bounced for a while, without a care or a count, until the advent of the cell phone gave me a device to truly embrace. 

This is all to say that counting is hard. Do you think we’d have a metric system without also having ten fingers and ten toes? The first digits you learn aren’t those of a would-be paramour, but the ones conspicuously dangling off your extremities. You can count on it.