Things I Am Not Good At: Math and Cleverness

Sammy said he’s tried to get some of the customers at Arby’s excited about the Year of Charles Brockden Brown.  Most people think he’s speaking to someone else or is just another frothing, psychopathic Arby's worker.  Either way everyone ignores him.  Except one gentleman who said, “I’ve read Wieland, you know.”  Apparently Sammy told the man that it’s the 199th anniversary of CBdB’s death.  The man asked Sammy why he didn’t just wait one year to celebrate on the nice round number, and Sammy informed him that CBdB died 200 years ago, so it’s only the 199th anniversary.  It took more time for an Arby’s worker to fill the customer’s sleeve of curly fries than it did for the man to convince Sammy that if he died 200 years ago it was indeed the 200th anniversary.

Sammy came to the Sleep Center irritated with me: “The one guy who would even want to celebrate the Year of CBdB, and he thinks I’m an idiot because I followed your math.”  Sammy was less annoyed with me when I backed over his grandmother’s cat with his mother’s car while his sister watched.  I tried to explain to Sammy that it's only the 199th anniversary, but every time I tried it all got jumbled in my head.  Sammy stopped me by putting his hand on my shoulder, like the school bus driver did when I was a kid: “I’m not going to make someone sit next to you."

Sammy must have felt bad about being irritated with me because when I went off shift he was waiting with a bag of Arby’s for me and the explanation, "It's been a long day, man."  We caught the bus home together and played ping pong in my basement.  When Sammy left he made a snowball from one of the last patches of snow and chucked it hard at the dead Camaro in front of my house.  Sammy said it's a wonderful sound when a thick snowball hits a door panel.  I told him to listen to the mourning doves singing above us.  They're a wonderful sound, too.

Not long after Rachel and I first met and she heard a mourning dove, she thought it was an owl.  I told her it was the dove, and it’s called a mourning dove not because of the time of day but because it sounds like someone it loved had died.  She said, “Me and you, Cyrus, we’re mourning doves.”  I wasn’t really paying attention so I said, “They can ruin people's gutters.”  But then I realized what she meant because of my parents and her sister, but it was too late.  She patted me on the shoulder kind of like Sammy, the school bus driver, and the garbage man who when I was a kid let me ride on the back of the truck: “It looks like you need a win, kid.”

The rest of that night I tried to say something clever like she did, but it always came out weird.  When we rode the bus she had said something about time passing quickly.  I tried to be poetic and said, “I’d rather be dead than not have any legs.”  I must have been staring at the handicap entrance to the bus or something.  Rachel didn’t get mad or laugh at me, though.  She just said she highly doubted I believed that, and in a few minutes had me convinced that I’d want

to be alive no matter how many appendages I had, just so I could say I shared the same planet as one of my favorite birds, like the Great Crested Flycatcher.  “And it doesn’t even have arms,” Rachel said.  And I laughed because it was funny, and because it was Rachel there next to me.