A Numbers Game

Adella saw the remnants of a small, sinfully delicious chocolate cake on my kitchen island.

"That was a cake Pop Pop and I ate yesterday to celebrate the day we got married," I say.

"You weren't married?" she asks incredulously. If she were older I would suspect she was questioning my morality.

I laugh. "Oh, we were married a long time ago. But just like the way you celebrate the day you were born on your birthday, so we celebrate the day we were married on our anniversary every year."

That satisfies her.

Then I take a gamble. I ask, "Do you know how long ago it was that Pop Pop and Granma got married?"

She clearly understands that she is five and that Marshall is two. I really should not have asked a question, when I do not know how she will answer. But I am curious to see how far her concept of time goes. I am certain she will underestimate.

"A hundred years."

I laugh again. "No quite that long ago," I say.

"Fourteen years," she offers as an alternative.

And now it is time for Granma to give Adella a little math lesson at the same time that her mother is giving more advanced math lessons to her AB Calculus class.

"No, fourteen is not enough," I reply. "We have been married longer than fourteen years and less than one hundred. You need a number that is in-between fourteen and one hundred."

"Eighteen," she says.

She has, in fact, picked a larger number. But I decide to give her a little more help to get to the right number.

"No, your mother is thirty-one years old. She was born after we were married. You need a number that is more than thirty-one."

"Then it must be a hundred," she replies confidently.

At this point, Pop Pop, who has a snow day off from work unlike Adella's mother and is missing the fact that he is not giving math lessons to his AP Calculus class, says, "Let's count together."

So Adella starts, "14, 15, 16 . . ."

As she approaches 20, Pop Pop joins in to get her from the numbers that have a one-to-one correspondence in her mind to those numbers that seem to belong to an imaginary realm.

"30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35," Pop Pop says with Adella echoing him. "35 is the number of years we have been married," he pronounces exuberantly.

Is he so exultant because he considers it an achievement to have lived with me for so many years, I wonder.

Adella is unimpressed. Perhaps I should have agreed with her when she thought the number was one hundred, goosing the numbers just a bit to celebrate our achievement. After all, in her mind, and sometimes mine, thirty-five years is just as long as one hundred.