31
15/03/12 05:39
Today is the 75th day of the year. Most years March 15 is the 74th day, but in leap year, it comes one day later. There are 291 days remaining until the end of the year. Welcome to the Ides of March. It is a day with great significance for our family.
31 years ago the weather was unusually mild on March 15. We were living in North Dakota, a place known for cold winters and slow springs, but I really got spring fever that year. In fact, I put out two sets of tomato plants that got frozen just because I couldn’t wait to get the garden in and was misled by the warm weather to think that the cold had passed. We knew better in North Dakota. It was just the mood of the year. March 15, 1981 was the day that we became parents for the first time.
It was a Sunday and the labor had been long. We had gone to the hospital the night before and spent a sleepless night buoyed by excitement and the sheer hard work of labor. Leading the 9:00 service was out - same for the 11:00 a.m. service. Folks at the 11:a.m. service went down to coffee to wait for the phone call from the hospital. Isaac was born just after noon. I didn’t make the 1:30 p.m. service at the nursing home, either. With mother and baby sleeping, I went home to shower and get some rest, but I was too excited to sleep. I went back to the hospital just to look at the little guy.
And I really don’t know how it got to be three decades later. It has been an amazing and wonderful journey. For the last year and 35 days I have had the joy of watching that baby-now-grown be the father of a son of his own. It is a miracle every time I think of it.
The “1” years have been good for us. Susan was born in ’51. Isaac was born in ’81. Elliot was born in ’11. So it makes sense that 31 years is some kind of special year for us.
31 is the Mersenne prime. It is a centered triangular number, a centered pentagonal number and a centered decagonal number. No integer added up to its base 10 digits results in 31, so 31 is a self number. Not only is 31 a prime, so is 331 as well as 3,331 and 33,331. The series continues with 333,331; 3,333,331 and 33,333,331. Some people used to think that every number in that form would be prime. But such is not the case. The next nine numbers in the sequence are composite numbers.
31 is the number of days in nine of the months (January, March, May, July, August, October and December). It is the number for international direct-dial phone calls to the Netherlands. And, more significantly, 31 is the number of flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream. In Japan the chops are called 31 Ice Cream. It is the number of triads in music (12 major, 12 minor, 4 diminished and 3 augmented).
It is the atomic number of gallium.
It is quite a number. And for the next year we will use it to identify our son’s age. Which also says something about our ages since we weren’t exactly teenagers when we became parents.
But it is just a number. Next year he will be 32 the following year his sister will turn 31. Then it is a long wait until 2042 when our grandson turns 31. I’ll be reaching toward 90 by that time.
We are funny that way. We seem to want to count everything as if assigning a number would give us some way of making sense of the passage of time. But anyone who has lived at all knows that time doesn’t always pass at the same rate. A month of waiting for a two-year old is an eternity. For an old guy like me, knowing that the tax deadline is just a month away makes it seem really close. An hour spent in a doctor’s waiting room passes at a different rate than an hour working in the garden. And if we have to wait for 10 minutes for the microwave to bake a potato, we think that we’ve waited far to long. We wouldn’t consider waiting 10 minutes for the computer to boot up, but I can remember when I used to start downloading my e-mail at bedtime because it took all night for the computer to exchange the data on a 300-baud dial-up modem. Our understanding of time is pretty strange.
31 years, however, is a significant amount of time. Something that is 31 years old is substantial and significant. After all, I’ve been counting the years since 1981. I expect to be able to count them for many years to come. 31 years seems shorter looking back that it did looking the other way. Back then I thought that making it to the turn of the century would be a significant accomplishment. Back then when I thought of people the age I am now, I thought of them as being, well, old. Time to get out of the way and make room for someone younger to step up to the plate. These days someone my age doesn’t seem old at all. But we were of the “don’t trust anyone over 30 generation” even though our personal experience never led us to think the statement was true.
When I was in seminary, I took a course on aging from a professor who was 74 years old. I thought that he ought to be an expert in the field. He claimed his expertise came from being the son of a 94-year-old mother. It is all a matter of perspective.
So here’s to 31 years. I expect the next 31 to be as momentous as the last have been.
It gives me a whole year to think of what I might write about the number 32.
31 years ago the weather was unusually mild on March 15. We were living in North Dakota, a place known for cold winters and slow springs, but I really got spring fever that year. In fact, I put out two sets of tomato plants that got frozen just because I couldn’t wait to get the garden in and was misled by the warm weather to think that the cold had passed. We knew better in North Dakota. It was just the mood of the year. March 15, 1981 was the day that we became parents for the first time.
It was a Sunday and the labor had been long. We had gone to the hospital the night before and spent a sleepless night buoyed by excitement and the sheer hard work of labor. Leading the 9:00 service was out - same for the 11:00 a.m. service. Folks at the 11:a.m. service went down to coffee to wait for the phone call from the hospital. Isaac was born just after noon. I didn’t make the 1:30 p.m. service at the nursing home, either. With mother and baby sleeping, I went home to shower and get some rest, but I was too excited to sleep. I went back to the hospital just to look at the little guy.
The “1” years have been good for us. Susan was born in ’51. Isaac was born in ’81. Elliot was born in ’11. So it makes sense that 31 years is some kind of special year for us.
31 is the number of days in nine of the months (January, March, May, July, August, October and December). It is the number for international direct-dial phone calls to the Netherlands. And, more significantly, 31 is the number of flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream. In Japan the chops are called 31 Ice Cream. It is the number of triads in music (12 major, 12 minor, 4 diminished and 3 augmented).
It is the atomic number of gallium.
It is quite a number. And for the next year we will use it to identify our son’s age. Which also says something about our ages since we weren’t exactly teenagers when we became parents.
But it is just a number. Next year he will be 32 the following year his sister will turn 31. Then it is a long wait until 2042 when our grandson turns 31. I’ll be reaching toward 90 by that time.
We are funny that way. We seem to want to count everything as if assigning a number would give us some way of making sense of the passage of time. But anyone who has lived at all knows that time doesn’t always pass at the same rate. A month of waiting for a two-year old is an eternity. For an old guy like me, knowing that the tax deadline is just a month away makes it seem really close. An hour spent in a doctor’s waiting room passes at a different rate than an hour working in the garden. And if we have to wait for 10 minutes for the microwave to bake a potato, we think that we’ve waited far to long. We wouldn’t consider waiting 10 minutes for the computer to boot up, but I can remember when I used to start downloading my e-mail at bedtime because it took all night for the computer to exchange the data on a 300-baud dial-up modem. Our understanding of time is pretty strange.
31 years, however, is a significant amount of time. Something that is 31 years old is substantial and significant. After all, I’ve been counting the years since 1981. I expect to be able to count them for many years to come. 31 years seems shorter looking back that it did looking the other way. Back then I thought that making it to the turn of the century would be a significant accomplishment. Back then when I thought of people the age I am now, I thought of them as being, well, old. Time to get out of the way and make room for someone younger to step up to the plate. These days someone my age doesn’t seem old at all. But we were of the “don’t trust anyone over 30 generation” even though our personal experience never led us to think the statement was true.
When I was in seminary, I took a course on aging from a professor who was 74 years old. I thought that he ought to be an expert in the field. He claimed his expertise came from being the son of a 94-year-old mother. It is all a matter of perspective.
So here’s to 31 years. I expect the next 31 to be as momentous as the last have been.
It gives me a whole year to think of what I might write about the number 32.