A Simple Puzzle

Imagine your life being over in the 6th grade. In one brutal stroke, I was undone.

I trudged home slowly, intentionally stepping on every crack with well aimed and utter precision, dreading my mother's inevitable satisfaction and my daddy's disappointment, imagining the jeering and rejoicing of my brothers, anticipating that this was a failure I would never live down. I looked at the malicious and glaring "D" - printed in bright, bold red so as to call attention to itself and stand out from the other grades - and despaired. It wouldn't matter that this was the very first non-perfect grade in my short academic career, wouldn't matter a bit. My daddy, to whom mathematics was second nature, as clear and straightforward as a sunny day, would grieve over this. My mother, never content with the consistent straight A's I had always brought home and always ready with a nasty smile and nastier remark ( Nobody's that smart, you must have cheated.) would celebrate this failure. ( Jan, my daddy always protested without much enthusiasm, children don't cheat.)

Numbers had unexpectedly stopped making sense to me, stopped being logical and clear, stopped being a simple puzzle. I had no explanation for this phenomena and less of an idea how to fix it. I studied hard, tried to look at mathematics in different ways, paid strict attention in class, and still my tests and homework assignment results were dismal. I worried that this would become a pattern I would never escape and now in one report card, my worst fears had been confirmed. I was terror stricken at the prospect of making this public.

Things did not improve in junior high or even in high school. I failed Business Math, repeated it and passed, but failed Algebra. I repeated Algebra and passed only to fail Trig and so on. Looking at my senior year grades, my advisor suggested we not even bring Calculus into the realm of possibility and I graduated by the narrowest margin, mostly due to finally passing an Advanced Algebra course the second time around. The entire concept of mathematics had by then turned into incomprehensible nonsense. I was perfect in English, Fourth Year French, Biology, Sociology, and all four years of History but broken and tragically flawed by mathemathics, it might as well have been Arabic.

Now, a lifetime later and just a few years away from Medicare eligibility myself, the evil of mathematics - this time in the form of medical billing and the mechanics of health insurance - has returned to haunt me and complicate my life. Any rational foundation of numbers is hidden in a maze of allowables and percentages, fractions, and red tape inspired rules that serve only to protect the insurance companies and confound anyone foolish enough to try and decipher their methods. Each day I sit and try to un-jumble it, I'm reminded of my 6th grade report card, of that wretched, oversized "D" and the pattern I set for myself.

We are too soon old and too late smart.