Numbers Racket.

"Well, man, how you dealing with all that carnage on Wall Street?" That's what I get in many of my e-mail messages or phone calls. All the billions of dollars flying around in people's chatter can easily make you forget that everything starts small.

"Man! My head bursting with what they give my child to do for homework. It's not a matter of numeracy, but they use a different language to explain maths." My friend's head then plunked into the workbook in front of her; her middle school child was nowhere to be seen. Why, I asked myself, was this mother fretting over her child's homework? Well, we took sympathy on her and poured some wine and tried to understand whether to subtract you "take" or "borrow". "It's take, because borrow means that you give it back..." That piece of sense then fell into a debate about whether this was old maths or new maths. "No. New maths is things like sets, and Venn diagrams..." I asked for an "El Dorado" with ice.

When I was a boy, my parents just gave me a good bedroom in which to work; they made sure that I had supper; they banned TV or play outside until my homework was finished; and that was that. I don't think I'm forgetting how it really was. I giggled to myself and gave praise that I did not have to deal with children's homework again, yet.

My little five year old came home yesterday with a few items in her paw. The usual painting--of a mango, guava, apple tree. Why is it that the imagination of a child sees no limits to the possible? Some neat squiggly lines on a piece of paper that looked like a string of "e"s, accompanied by her attempts to do the same, which were squiggly lines for sure. Then she told me that she had to do some "mathemanatics". My eyes don't pop open easily, but I noted the word and asked her what that was. "It's numbers, Daddy. You know, ones and twos, and stuff." Oh, I thought, but saw no need to correct the term used. So, off we went on a little tour of numbers theory, for five year olds. I enjoyed relearning how to count.

Last week, I had had a similar joyful tour with "Beefy", who sat in the back of my car on the way to gym class doing what she called singing. "Why are you making that noise?" I asked. "I'm singing. It's Mozart." I was duly silenced, by that and by her telling me that she knew Mozart's mummy. "Uncle, you know that if you are a child and you go into the future, you're a grown up." No disagreement there from me. "And, Uncle, if you are a grown up and go into the future, you're a child again." Well, my first thought was children chat such foolishness. But as I got to my second and third thoughts, I had to agree. I'm certainly receding into a second childhood it seems, or is it just that being around under-tens has that rejuvenating effect?

"Beefy" then went on to tell me about how she had done "adding" that day. I wondered if she had dealt with time travel and other aspects of high physics too. "So, what did you learn, Beefy? Did you add ones and twos?" No, she told me: "We counted chickens. And we counted eggs. It's easy. Eight chickens, ten eggs." I knew where this was going, as she started to cluck instead of sing. Come back, Wolfgang, I thought. I knew that the scrambled feeling would soon come over my brain. I smiled to myself and looked at this sweet Little Einstein's image in my rear view mirror, as she went on to count chickens and eggs on her fingers. Priceless.