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My yahrzeit candle has flickered out and I've had a long memory-laden phone call with my mother. Mostly we talked about exhibits past at various museums, which was probably not the kind of memory you would expect given yesterday's post.
We also discussed dating systems, because this is year nineteen since Dad's death which means I lit my yahrzeit candle and it was both the Jewish date of death and the secular date of death. Every nineteen years everything repeats. This happens in church cycles, too, but only for some parts of the calendar.
We both decided we were miserable and complained a bit about stuff and realised that 99% of the misery was part of the calendrical cycle. For some reason this was reassuring. Maths and harmonies have always been important to my family.
I find this worrying, sometimes. I find it especially worrying when the teenagers appear to have inherited the tendency. One Friday afternoon five of them were seeing how many possible ways of proving an equation they could find while they munched afternoon tea. Not all the proofs were sane. One of them involved sitting on an aunt's lap. Teenagers are a mystery, even when mathematically inclined.
Mostly the reassurance of numbers reminds me that I'm the family rebel. I usually find history far more comforting than maths. But when history is too close and too emotional, then numbers are very grounding.
We also discussed dating systems, because this is year nineteen since Dad's death which means I lit my yahrzeit candle and it was both the Jewish date of death and the secular date of death. Every nineteen years everything repeats. This happens in church cycles, too, but only for some parts of the calendar.
We both decided we were miserable and complained a bit about stuff and realised that 99% of the misery was part of the calendrical cycle. For some reason this was reassuring. Maths and harmonies have always been important to my family.
I find this worrying, sometimes. I find it especially worrying when the teenagers appear to have inherited the tendency. One Friday afternoon five of them were seeing how many possible ways of proving an equation they could find while they munched afternoon tea. Not all the proofs were sane. One of them involved sitting on an aunt's lap. Teenagers are a mystery, even when mathematically inclined.
Mostly the reassurance of numbers reminds me that I'm the family rebel. I usually find history far more comforting than maths. But when history is too close and too emotional, then numbers are very grounding.