| I discovered in high school that I had a knack for algebra. That came as a big surprise to me. I had just about given up on numbers. Who wouldn't after having had his brains rattled first by incomprehensible clock faces and then by more understandable but equally intimidating multiplication tables?
The wonder of it! I was actually adept at algebra, a branch of mathematics. I had to share the good news.
But who to tell? I had lost touch with Juny, my good friend in early childhood. There was Mike. He had shown us neighborhood guys enduring qualities of leadership. He would show them to the world later in the arena of business, but his adjustment to high school seemed to be sputtering. To make a short story shorter yet, I told Mike.
"Mike," I said, "I'm good at algebra."
No answer.
"I'm really good at it."
Still no answer.
"When I walk into that algebra classroom with my sharp pencils in my pocket I feel like I own the world!"
"You like sharp pencils?"
The conversation wasn't going as I had expected it would. "Yes," I said.
"I don't like sharp pencils."
"Oh?"
"You can write darker if the point isn't sharp."
Mike sauntered away leaving me to grasp for the deeper meaning of the conversation. I haven't grasped it to this day, but I'm convinced there is a deeper meaning there somewhere. After all, the guy became a business tycoon.
On second thought, what Mike and I were probably talking about was humor. I remember now that we both grinned at the end of our little talk. I had become the school humorist, writing a weekly column for the student newspaper, and Mike's: You can write darker if the point isn't sharp, was humor. In a manner of speaking he was talking my language. How could I forget? Glad I've finally got that straightened out.
So there it was. It appears now, though I didn't realize it at the time, that mathematics wasn't my problem. Arithmetic, numbers were my problem. Algebra is as much about words, stories as it is numbers. Thus my success. I found that I could almost always solve for x provided there weren't too many numbers cluttering things up. I was fairly good at geometry too.
Trigonometry was another story, no, part of this story. Figure of speech.
Sines, cosines, laborious calculations. I got a D in trigonometry. I'm not surprised.
As it turned out Mathematics wasn't through with me yet, nor I it. In that part of my life which I still fondly refer to as University Dazed, I came face-to-face with probability theory, advanced statistical applications, and yes, Florida friends, Mathematical Political Analysis.
Damn the chads! Full steam ahead!
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