When Beth was a young child, about 3 or 4, and just into nursery school, she asked me one day, "Mom, what's the last number?"
I did my best to explain infinity -- there is no last number -- any number you pick to be the last, you can always add 1 to it and make another number. Numbers just go on forever.
What a brilliant child, I'm thinking -- so young to have such questions.
"Well," she answered with a little giggle, "At my school, it's 99."
Numbers
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancer dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And the multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrow take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.
There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mother’s call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.
Mary Cornish
