Subtraction.<\/p>\n
That’s simple, isn’t it?<\/p>\n
Yet at some point in the late afternoon, I lost my ability to subtract one two-digit number from another two-digit number. Over the course of a minute, I wondered if a part of my brain was failing me, and whether this failure was temporary, due to shock, or whether it was gone for good.<\/p>\n
I’ve always been able to subtract easily in my head, and can even add columns of numbers without sinking into the drawer containing my calculator. Yet I was genuinely frozen when trying to calculate mentally the differential between the numbers 48 and 17. Or maybe it was 47 and 16 but you can see what I was trying to figure out.<\/p>\n
I started out in the good old way: the number 7 subtracted from the number 8 is…one? OK, well, um. OK so I hold that one up there in my head and advance to the numbers 4 and 1. But is it 4? Didn’t I have to carry one over to the 7 or whatever, leaving a 3 from which I’d deduct the 1?<\/p>\n
I began to breathe heavily. It could not be that differential was 31? Could it? Really, it couldn’t, could it?<\/p>\n
Impossible.<\/p>\n
Yesterday my brain failed to function with chill mathematical truth. I had to force myself against my flailing brain to accept that the differential was indeed 31.<\/p>\n
I’m still a tad shaky. Which is why I’m writing this at 4:29 pm, before I turn the TV on. I need to stabilize before seeing how beautifully Buffalo fans cleared feet of snow off the Bills football field. (They were paid $20 an hour. I bet I could multiply 20 by however many hours they shoveled but I don’t know how many hours they shoveled.)<\/p>\n
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Subtraction. That’s simple, isn’t it? Yet at some point in the late afternoon, I lost my ability to subtract one two-digit number from another two-digit number. Over the course of a minute, I wondered if a part of my brain … Continue reading