The Numbers Game

2021 . . . 2022 . . . what do the numbers mean? They really only have significance to the individual, and then only some of the time.

1865 – GM Inglis was born somewhere in Scotland, maybe Edinburgh.

1899 – Daisy Elizabeth Inglis was born in Brooklyn to become part of the Inglis clan living in America

1934 – Daisy gives birth to a young lad, Richard Eugene by name, somewhere in Brooklyn also.

1935 – Carol Kathleen Foreman pops out into this world and her mom and dad, Kathleen and Robert decide she is a keeper, and they will love her forever.

1955 – Carol and Richard decide at very tender ages, to forge a permanent union of two souls.

1956 – Carol gives birth to a tiny baby, who is then named Karen Lee, rather than, say, 56. The little baby decides later she wants a new name, and so she decides to change her assigned name to Kailia.

1959 – Carol gives birth to another tiny baby, this one named Kathleen. She thinks her name is fine, thanks.

1966 – Hold on folks, Carol has decided to give birth to a third tiny baby, and that baby will be known as Erika Anu.

And then the list of tiny babies born into the world continues, amidst continued changes in those funny numbers. The numbers are called “Years” for some reason. Humans decided a while back to break up time into segments and then label all the segments—Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia and on and on. We humans use these segments to mark the thing we call our lives. See, because we tend not to live forever, we assign segment markers to our lives, and to the events in our lives.  Those markers are supposed to signify importance of some kind, and we are allowed to use the segments to signify the goodness or other in our lives. As in, “Goodness, he just turned One, and he is walking already”. Or, “Harry is only four, but he talks like he is already 9 or 10.” Or, “Oh, My, Josie has turned 21, so she can legally drink alcohol”.

And then as humans acquire larger numbers concerning their lives, we begin to think of them as ageless (or, really as old), as in “wow, he just turned 80. He is looking great, but that’s really old”.

And then, we also assign meaning to the periods in which we live, as in “The roaring (19) Twenties”. Or, “wow, the (19) thirties were really a drag. Everyone was poor, and then we entered that War”.

We worked, raised kids, and became educated, changed jobs, all while counting numbers — remember 1969? Yeah, that’s when we moved to DC. Somehow, those “19” something years seemed important and even meaningful, mainly because things happened to change our lives, and we assigned a number to them.

And then we zoomed past a final decade and suddenly we were into a new Millennium.  See, we had never used that term before. Now 2000 seemed uneventful, just another year, albeit in a different millennium.  Then we hit 2001, and that seemed different. Why? Well because we had a kind of weird film by that name, yeah that 2001.  And that film, which was actually produced in 1968 (the year we returned to America from our four-year life in India) described wholly new kinds of experiences.  Now to be fair, we had already experienced space travel, when in 1969 (remember 1969?) we landed someone on the moon.  But that limited space travel seemed more exotic somehow that that pictured in 2001.

But 2001 . . . wow. We had actually entered a new millennium. It was different somehow from that change when we entered the 20^th century, although to be fair, I was not here, so I really do not know how folks felt as we entered the 20^th century.  I know my mum was born in that 19^th century place and then moved smartly into our 20^th century.  And here’s the crux of it. See I identify myself as being a creature of that 20th century.  Yeah, I know that I have been alive through now 21 years of this new century, so I’m sort of like my mum in 1920.  I wonder how she felt in those roaring 20s. Goodness, she was footloose and fancy-free.

But 2020?  Or, worse yet, 2022?? Do those numbers raise anything interesting in your minds? Well, maybe 2020 represents a dark period in America, unlike its predecessor, 1920. 2020 represents the first (happily unsuccessful) attempted coup d’état on the American Republic.  Yeah, Republicans, under the leadership of Donald Trump, a President headed out to pasture, decided that they really did not like Democracy, preferring instead a system whereby republicans simply decide who our leaders will be. Yeah, so maybe this second decade of the 21^st century represents the beginning of a dark period in America and maybe even the world, a period we might call Anarchy.  And so maybe this 21^st century will represent to future historians the beginning of the end of our world.  Yeah, the destruction of the American Experiment, a Global Pandemic in which much of the world simply dies, followed by Climate change that causes much of the rest of our world to fall apart, perhaps returning it to its pre-human state, when hummingbirds ruled their world.

And then maybe numbers cease.  They were fun in that 20^th century, at least until 1980, that day the Music died.  But maybe now the hummingbirds will decide what we should call this 21^st century. Yeah, they’re nice dudes, and even some fun. And how much worse could they be than Donald Trump? So, move aside humans, by choosing Donald Trump, you signaled that you were no longer interested in preserving our world of numbers and counting things.  Instead, idiocy was preferred. So, now the hummingbirds have decided to take over, before we complete the destruction.  And maybe they have been in contact with those Aliens who have been wandering around waiting for us to leave.  I wonder if the Aliens speak Hummingbird?

So, let’s see what happens next. I understand that, instead of using numbers, this second decade of our new millennium will be known as Hummingbirdiana. Nice huh??