Extraordinary How Mathematics Helps One To Know Oneself
By Julia Van Develder
Dec01
Five days a week for five years
minus vacations
equals one thousand seven hundred
and twenty-five times
you’ve driven past
at least a hundred houses
on your way to work.
Raised ranches
in suburban semicircles,
handy man specials
with rusted chevys up on blocks in the yard,
yuppified farmhouses
with complicated swingsets.
All these years, you’ve rarely
seen a soul.
But on this particular morning,
you leave home early
for no particular reason
and find yourself
stuck behind a schoolbus
that stops at the white house
with the blue shutters
you never noticed until now.
You sigh inaudibly,
thinking why me,
the one day I was actually
going to be on time.
And then you watch
as five grown men
walk single file down the gravel drive.
One carries his lunch box tight against his chest
like a prize.
Another has his hair gelled up
and a puffy white coat.
The last one
smiling smiling
stops and stoops and ties his shoe
and you realize
in that split second
that you never knew.
You never knew.