An Equation Grows in Brooklyn

I was going to write about Dyscalculia--the crippling and unnerving disability I have suffered from since girlhood. Until the other day, when M.O. and I looked it up, I called it Mathlexia (which, for someone who does not suffer much lexiconically speaking, should have been immediately apparent as incongruous). Others called it slow, boneheaded, nitwitted, challenged. But if I'd been armed with such a word as dyscalculia I might never have developed my exceptionally coordinated Counting-On-Hands maneuver, or played the game my parents still delightedly play with me wherein I am given some absurd multiplication task such as 8 x 12 while they await their inevitable victory over my feeble mind, or have avoided working in retail and most monies related work because I knew I could never count change. It's a real problem when I don't have exact change and the delivery person from Thai Lantern is minutes away.

I was going to write about Dyscalculia but as I walked down Montague Street this Sunday on a simple errand to the hardware store I was stopped by a performance in the blocked off street by the Martha Cordona Opera Theater. A soprano was singing a song we all know, her beautiful voice clearer than any ambient car or human sound--a little bit of extreme beauty offered for free in the middle of a Brooklyn street. I can sing. I can add. Her voice soars above city streets. My mind goes haywire when I try to subtract. And I thought, maybe I do know a little division afterall.