I say the number 9 is my favorite number in the same way a child labels a number lucky. Nine is my favorite lucky number.
My birth month falls in the 9th calendar month of the year. The number that marks our home, makes it stand out in the neighborhood, is nothing less than good old favorite number 9. In a book I once read, the protagonist is a young math teacher and her every daily encounter is replete with numerical reference. One of her students thinks the number 9 looks like girls playing in the grass. I like that and how its fine round body sits on a sturdy slanted stem. Oblique in that way, neither parallel nor perpendicular, but inclined. Inclined: It slants toward possibility.
I once met the book's author and she signed my copy while we talked about our favorite numbers. Guess what? She is a 9-lover, too; and into my book she placed the number 9 with an exclamation point at the center of a hand-drawn sun. And I thought, anything IS possible.
Yesterday, a grasshopper came flying out of the blue sky and landed on a wind chime in the backyard. For more than an hour, I checked its progress as it moved from wooden tier to silver cylinder all the way to the top of the chime and back again to where it first landed. It never made a sound.
As an insect totem, the grasshopper is a harbinger of luck and a green light for leaps of faith. I would find them in the dry summer grasses of my youth and catch them and hold them in my cupped hands and whisper, "Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew." Before releasing them back to the grasses, they would deposit a brown residue into my hands. There I'd be, a girl playing in the grass--a lucky number 9--tobacco juice in my hands.
My birth month falls in the 9th calendar month of the year. The number that marks our home, makes it stand out in the neighborhood, is nothing less than good old favorite number 9. In a book I once read, the protagonist is a young math teacher and her every daily encounter is replete with numerical reference. One of her students thinks the number 9 looks like girls playing in the grass. I like that and how its fine round body sits on a sturdy slanted stem. Oblique in that way, neither parallel nor perpendicular, but inclined. Inclined: It slants toward possibility.
I once met the book's author and she signed my copy while we talked about our favorite numbers. Guess what? She is a 9-lover, too; and into my book she placed the number 9 with an exclamation point at the center of a hand-drawn sun. And I thought, anything IS possible.
Yesterday, a grasshopper came flying out of the blue sky and landed on a wind chime in the backyard. For more than an hour, I checked its progress as it moved from wooden tier to silver cylinder all the way to the top of the chime and back again to where it first landed. It never made a sound.
As an insect totem, the grasshopper is a harbinger of luck and a green light for leaps of faith. I would find them in the dry summer grasses of my youth and catch them and hold them in my cupped hands and whisper, "Chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew tobacco, chew." Before releasing them back to the grasses, they would deposit a brown residue into my hands. There I'd be, a girl playing in the grass--a lucky number 9--tobacco juice in my hands.
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