The Magical Number

By Charlie Allison

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us”    Hebrews 12:1

Three. A magical number. Three fingers, with palm facing me as I looked up. Symmetry, with the middle finger flanked by the index and ring fingers. The three fingers were thrust very near to my face. One of my earliest memories- a visual image that would guide me.

My cousin explained, “Three, that’s not very many, is it? You are only three, Charlie.” She counted her fingers, “…one, two, three… see, that’s not very many. So what do you know? Not much. You just don’t know.”

Evidently I had committed a serious faux pas and was now getting a chance to learn. I was grateful.

“Look at me,” she continued, holding up nine fingers. “I am nine. That’s a lot, isn’t it? A lot more than three!” This was hard to deny.

“So I know a lot more than you. You don’t know much.” My perspective was thus enhanced, and my gratitude overflowed.

Other cousins and siblings reinforced the lesson for me. “Yeah, I’m seven,” said one, holding up seven fingers. My education seemed to be everyone’s concern. “I am twelve,” said another. “I don’t even have that many fingers, because that is more than ten!” Such opportunity to learn is a blessing that not everyone receives at such an early age.

This respect for elders stuck with me. Especially for the really old, like my twelve-year-old cousin. He obviously knew just about everything.

When my siblings and cousins left for school, then it was time to play. Not that I didn’t appreciate their educational influence, but sometimes I liked to be alone and just figure things out for myself. While they were at school, the entire house and yard were my personal playground. With Daddy working during the day, it was just my mother and me.

Mother and I would play games together.  We would take an old cardboard box, draw a gas pedal and a brake on it, and drive all over the world. We would go “fishing”, where a bed was the boat and the floor was the water. A coat hanger served as the fishing pole, and we caught all sorts of stuff. We would watch the squirrels out the window on a rainy day, as one eating a nut on our fencepost simply curled his tail up for an umbrella and kept on eating his acorn in the rain.

Often I would play outside by myself and Mother would watch from the window while she was working. I liked this time alone.

Playing with Mother was just fun. We would read books – all sorts of books. Some were from her days as a schoolteacher. Then there was the chalkboard in the hallway near the floor, next to the kitchen. Mother and I would play around with numbers there.  It turns out there are a whole lot of numbers bigger than three.

Sometimes she made a grid of numbers, so I could add them up, across and then down, as well as down and then across. Oddly enough, the total kept coming out the same either way. I took the challenge from Mother to find numbers where that didn’t work, and yet it always did. I was amazed. It was lots of fun playing.

When my siblings and cousins came home from school, my education resumed.  I learned stuff like how if you hit your head hard, sometimes it swells up into a knot, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Not that Mother didn’t teach me things – she did. Like how to pray. She taught me that God can hear our prayers whether we say them out loud, whisper them under our breath, or just think the words in our minds. She taught me that all people are equal in God’s eyes and all deserve to be treated with respect. It doesn’t matter whether you are tall or short, have a great job or not, or how pretty or smart you are, what color your eyes are, your skin is, or your hair is. It doesn’t matter how old you are – little kids, older people or even really old people, like 25 or 30 or even older. So if you are mean to someone or don’t show proper respect to someone, it is one of God’s children you are treating that way, and how is He going to feel about that? It’s something to ponder.

She said that we should think of other people more than ourselves. She taught me to always tell the truth.

When it came time for me to start kindergarten, I was excited but apprehensive. Then Mother said, “You don’t want to go to kindergarten do you? That’s just for mothers who want a babysitter.”  Wow. New information. I didn’t know that. I would like to make new friends at school, but then the lure of another year of freedom was very appealing. And so I stayed home another year.

I finally started first grade the next year. At the end of my first day, I couldn’t wait to tell my mother the big news: “The teacher says that we will learn how to read by the end of next week!” My mother’s smile seemed to slowly turn into a quizzical look, not quite a frown. “What’s wrong, Mother?” She looked at me as one who has sympathy and does not know how to break bad news.  Now I was getting worried. She slowly stated, “Now Charlie…..you know that you have been reading for a long time now.”

Oh…. Hit me between the eyes with a hammer! Of course. Putting letters together and knowing the words they mean, understanding sentences and stories from the letters on the page – that is reading. Talk about bursting my bubble! Suddenly school didn’t seem so great. The wonderful thing that I was looking forward to was now no big deal. Nothing new. Huh.  Oh well, at least I could make some friends at school, since I had to deal with all the rules and confinement anyway.

I began spending more time with my father. There were animals to feed – like cows.  There was hay to bale (again – for the cows). There were animals to hunt – mostly deer. It seemed to me the cows got the better end of that deal.

Daddy liked numbers. He always wanted you to give him some. How many people are in your class?  How many people were at the ball game? Or at a meeting you might attend. At first, my siblings and I did not get it. We would say “A bunch.” Frown. “But how many is in a bunch? How many is that?”

”I don’t know.” That in particular was never an acceptable answer. The refrain would continue. “Well about how many?” I don’t know. Were there a thousand? I would laugh. Of course not. The room wouldn’t hold that many. Were there only two or three? Or a hundred? This would continue until we had surmised that there were maybe 25 to 30 people in the classroom.

You had to give the man a number! He would not let go!

We all learned to count wherever we went, because we knew when we got home the question was coming. How many? It was like the man’s digestive system required a certain quantity of numbers. It made him happy. My brothers got especially good at it. One would say, “There were 9 people at the meeting.  Four were wearing glasses and three had on cowboy boots.” Home run! Daddy loved it. Information, he kept saying – he needed information. And while that could include words, thoughts, people’s names, etc., it was never quite as good unless it included some numbers.

There were many times that I wished he would just leave me alone and stop with the questions.

Sometimes the numbers had to be exact, like when you were counting cows. If even one was missing, that meant we looked for her until we found her. At other times estimates were more appropriate, like with large crowds of people. We had to learn what types of estimates were acceptable in different situations. You had to stay on your toes.

Daddy was also big on integrity and hard work. He liked to say “Every second counts.” And I imagined that he was counting them!

Yes, my education seemed to be everyone’s concern, and what a blessing that was.