If a Bird Flies Due South...

The question went something like this:

Five eighths of the pizza’s weight comes from its toppings. The pizza weighs ______.

Cheese makes up two thirds of the toppings. How much did the cheese weigh?

It was a stumper. Fifteen minutes passed as we drove from one town to another, an aunt and three nephews, and we were still working on the problem. The school year was just a couple of days old and there was pre-algebra homework to do, a bit of fraction/multiplication and division review. They were good at math but the summer’s pixie stick dust had settled in as it always does in July and August and it hadn't floated off yet. 

I don’t get it, my nephew said.

I wanted to say, honey, you’re in the wrong car. I shuddered a little thinking of math word problems I’d known. They always seemed to involve cars moving across interstates at 52 and 58 miles an hour, one from Des Moines, the other Cleveland and we were to determine who would get to Big Pine first. Inevitably a bird flying due south overhead from Burlington would somehow factor in. There we’d be, my pencil and me, figuring and figuring as night closed in.

I wanted to be a math gal; don’t get me wrong. I spent a good part of my junior year in high school trying to untilt the seesaw that was my SAT score. My math teacher couldn’t have been kinder. She’ d stay after school to help a number of us who were flailing about. She cheerily insisted we would get it. I loved her optimism. The score went up but only through sheer will. I never did quite get it.

College started and I had my eye on a dream:  I would be a physical therapist. I dove into anatomy and physiology;  I couldn’t wait for biology. Physics, though, loomed large. I'd taken a  math class to get ready. My professor had office hours once a week and I became a frequent guest. 

I can still see him walking toward his office one afternoon when he spied me from the far end of the hallway. He started to scuttle sideways, like a hermit crab at the sound of footsteps. He was looking for a side door to dash into, a quick get-away. There wasn’t one.  Come along, he said and let out an audible sigh that trailed behind him into the office.

I kept at it but it didn’t end like Rudy. I had a 68 or 69, a whisper under a C-and for all the attempts, it remained a  D+. I never did get to physics.

One morning, that same semester in English class, we had to read something we’d written.  I can still see the guy who was sitting behind me as I got up to leave at the end of class. He had his baseball cap pulled down so low you could hardly find him.  I liked the sound of that, he said, or something like it.

That? I’d asked.

That thing you wrote.

Really.  Well alright.

                                                    ~      ~      ~

Back in the car we were still trying to figure out the cheese pizza thing. My nephew wanted to know if he'd ever use algebra. "Trust me," I said. "You will. Besides, you like pizza." He worked some more on the problem.

A week later I asked how the math was going. "Fine," he said.