#additition

I don't know my mom's mother's birth year, but I am guessing based on the hostility between the two that she was younger than the standard twenty years old when she had her. I am going to be generous and say seventeen. Other than his name I know very little about my maternal grandfather, and I can't even begin to guess his age, but I would assume relatively young, young enough not to take responsibility for his daughter, because I don't believe my maternal grandmother ever married him, the only name I ever knew her by was the one she took from the father of her second set of kids.

My maternal grandmother had twelve siblings, I am not sure where she fell in that order, but that was a lot of damned kids. My mom would have had first cousins up the wazoo, even if each one of them only had one child, which is highly doubtful based on their own sibling count.

I was born on the 11th of the month, the former sibling who is two years younger than me was born in a later month on the 11th day too. The last one was born at the end of the year on the 7th day. The number 11 is prominent in the first and last home I lived in in my hometown. My understanding is that 7 and 11 are winning numbers in a dice game. I am not sure if I have been lucky, but I have been blessed.

There are also 11 letters in my first and last name. Not a number, but curiously enough the last home I lived in had some other significance to me, it was Brown Street. It was four days before my eleventh birthday, when I found my mom dead on the couch. The street at the bottom of the hill that intersected my namesake was Elizabeth, my mom's middle name.

My mom died at 44, my dad followed her 9 years later also at 44, my youngest brother copied both of them and died at 44. My favorite comic book family is the Fantastic Four, I wish they had been called the Fantastic One Hundred, because maybe I would have had more time with all of them. My starter home was on 4th street, the only time I have ever lived on a numbered street.

I have lived in three residences with 9 in the three digit street address. The first also had the nine in the first position. The second it was third, and finally the current it's in the middle. Curiously my paternal grandfather died in '09, not a direct relation to the previous numbers but close enough. I lived seven years at the first address, four at the next, and twenty-nine at the current, there is that sneaky nine again.

I have never been one for numerology, I have never played the lottery, gambling generally has also not been an interest, but apophenia is curious to me, it is something we humans do naturally, attempt to find meaning in totally unrelated things, its the same way we see faces in inanimate objects or Black Jesus in the toast, we are always striving to find meaning in things that are usually totally meaningless.

Numbers have never been my strong point, I literally have trouble holding them in my head, which is why my morning counting game is so important. During my daily morning walks around the park I attempt to count all the unhoused folks and animals in the park. I then give an accounting in my daily text to my niece, usually with some additional commentary.

I can look at a number and within nanoseconds forget that number. I don't have the ability that my ex Paul had to hold long strings of numbers in my head indefinitely, he was a magician with calculations which was very appropriate for the work he did which was very math-heavy. In school my favorite math was logic, it was all very sensible, if this then that. Otherwise I am still pretty awful at math, I have had overdrafts because I wasn't able to calculate exactly how much money to transfer to my main account, not because I lacked the money, I lacked the math. I wish we worked in colors, I would excel with that, but alas that isn't the world we live in.