Words vs. numbers
A friend of mine is going back to school; like me she is trying to decide what she wants to be when she grows up, even though she is certainly grown up at 44 years of age. After I spent a year at college, I decided what I really wanted to be was retired, not immersed in another career. But my friend carries on, taking different classes and trying to find her direction. She fills me in on all that she is learning, and I’ve been able to help her with a couple papers, doing some editing and grammar checking. The other day when I spoke with her, she was telling me about her math class, and that she is now moving into geometry. As she started to tell me about all she has learned, I found myself enthralled by the terms used in geometry. Words like rhombus, parallelogram, trapezoid, quadrilateral, isosceles, and all the “gons” – pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, decagon – and the list goes on and on! Words that are fun to say, that just twist and turn and jump around! Maybe that was what pulled me into laboratory work in the first place – all the lovely medical terms. I always loved microbiology the best, and part of that was speaking in the language of bacteria and parasites – beautiful sounding names given to less than beautiful organisms. Numbers have always seemed so bland, so boring, so black and white. I could never play with them and have fun with them the way I can play with words. But I try to understand those who love working with numbers; we need them! Yet I am happy to stay on the side of the playground where the words come out to play.
Playtime
They come to me
Unbidden
The thoughts
In a line
Or an idea
To wrap up in verse
I ask which words
Would like to come out and play
I place them on the paper
In a certain fashion
My hand is guided
By my mind
Which is guided
By an unseen force
Which propels me to write
Asking me to come out and play
