133: In one miserable week . . .
Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” Chapter 9
9
IN ONE MISERABLE WEEK, I did learn to answer questions about the times tables more quickly than Mr. Beaker could snap his fingers. I also learned to snap my fingers, and I learned that the pattern on the wallpaper in my room repeated every eleven inches and that the meals my mother made lost all their restorative power when they were handed through my door on a tray, the puddle of gravy around my potatoes already dark and rubbery at the edges. However, I didn’t really learn the times tables very well at all. I memorized them as I might have memorized lines for a performance, and it worked pretty well. I was able to satisfy Mr. Beaker, impress Clarissa during our “practice” sessions, and please Mrs. Graham. But as soon as I had put on my performance, the lines began to slip away from me. Later, when I needed to know one of the products that had, while my mind was occupied with something else, crept into the dark unknown, never to return, I would reconstruct it from one of the ones that remained or count it out on my fingers, at least in my mind.
[to be continued on Wednesday, November 17, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 133, Mark Dorset considers Mathematics: Finger-Counting, Dactylonomy and Memory, Faulty: Causes of, Results of from this episode.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.