Life is a Math Problem

The first math problem.

My parents were married for sixty-seven years. They got married in the depths of the Great Depression, which I always thought was the heights of optimism.

They were very different people. Dad was an extravert; my mother described him as “terminally gregarious – not that he’ll die from it – I might, but he won’t” She was quiet, reserved. I now know that she was an introvert and needed alone time to recharge after gatherings.

She was a math-whiz who could do thirty-year compound interest in her head; she became a computer programmer in 1956. He was a printer, a salesman, with a bass voice that earned him soloist parts in Handel Hayden Choral Society and someone who today would be called an addictive personality.

They bickered, as I’ve come to learn most couples do. I commented on their bickering once in my teenaged know-it-all years suggesting that maybe they should get a divorce. They were shocked. My mother said, “I don’t understand divorce. I understand murder – but not divorce.” I think she saw horror on my literally minded teenage face and quickly continued, “Oh sometimes we snap at each other, sure, but sometimes we just laugh and laugh.”

There were a couple of humdinger fights, when they didn’t speak to each other. I always assumed that these were my father’s fault because he was a jokester,  a teaser, a “needler” who frequently missed signals that it was time to quit.

I remember one fight where they had obviously gone to bed mad or maybe just my mother was angry, my father seemed to have no clue why. He scrawled a question mark in crayon on a piece of paper and taped it to the refrigerator.

My mother quickly taped her answer in crayon underneath. It occurs to me that by itself these are words of wisdom.

The second math problem

The fight went on. Clearly my father still didn’t get it. He taped another question mark below.

My mother grabbed the blue crayon from the kitchen counter and started to scrawl. The crayon broke. I wasn’t happy; these were my crayons. She got a green one from my box and finished her response. Once again just standing on its own these math notations seem wise.

The third math problem

I think my father took meaning from these notations. He wrote his own equations with what seemed like a conciliatory question mark at the end. Again it stands alone, maybe even as the answer to complex international negotiations.

The fourth math problem

Now it was my mother’s turn to be confused.  I remember her looking at my father’s lst note and starting to respond and walking away as he watched from the hall. Finally she picked up the crayon and wrote a big question mark.

My father picked up the crayon almost as soon as she put it down and wrote his response while she watched. Again these words have a wider meaning, but apparently they did the trick. My parents hugged by the refrigerator for long enough that I grew impatient to get my crayons back.

Tomorrow is the twenty-second anniversary of my marriage to Billie. It’s a second marriage for us both, but we have now been married longer than either of us have been married before. We bicker some and have had some go-to-bed angry battles, but “sometimes we just laugh and laugh.”