The weather today is perfect. The morning is cool, the sun bright, a breeze stirs the air and the sky is brilliant blue with just a few clouds, small and wispy. It is a read on the deck day. I have a new book, and my dance card is empty.

I remember learning about coins. It was a kind of neat when I realized that a nickel was the same as five pennies and the dime was 2 nickels or ten pennies. I gave up the notion that the bigger coin, the nickel, was worth more based on its size. The worksheets had pictures of groups of coins and two different kinds of work problems using the pictures. The first sort of problem was to figure which coins to use to reach a given amount of money and the second was to add up the coins and figure how much they were worth together. I did all the problems, even the ones with quarters, though I seldom had a quarter, a rare amount of money for any kid in those days, the days when pennies had value.

One year we learned Roman numerals and did math problems using them. Mostly we added and subtracted. It was fun to learn ancient numbers though I never expected to need the skill, this recognition of V or X or D, but Roman numerals have never disappeared and pop up in the unlikeliest of places. Luckily I can still translate the numerals because every Super Bowl has a Roman numeral designation. I went looking and found out why: because the playoffs occur in a different calendar year than the regular season, the league can’t have the Super Bowl identified by year, like the NBA Finals or World Series. It’d be too confusing. For example, the Seahawks won the Super Bowl in 2014 but are the champions of the 2013 season. It’s easier to say the team won Super Bowl XLVIII, but there is now a glitch. For Super Blow L in 2016 they are ditching the L for the equivalent 5o because the NFL thinks the L by itself would be too confusing for the average person. The next year, though, we’ll go back to the tradition for Super Bowl LI. I guess average people understand two numbers.

A totally useless skill I learned was how to read and notate Gregorian chant. I liked making and coloring in the square boxes, but I have had no occasion to use it since.

Algebra, though, still remains two years of wasted time. Why I had to take algebra at all or even worse Algebra 2 or II is one of life’s mysteries. I haven’t ever used it. I know it has applications. I even found descriptions of a few. At the playground if you knew the weight of a person at the top of the slide and you knew the height of the slide you could roughly calculate how fast you would be traveling as you exited the bottom of the slide. Why would I care? What if the slide is sticky as some are? Then there’s dropping a rock off the roof of a house and wondering how long would it take to hit the ground. If you didn’t get caught climbing on the roof and somehow dropped a second rock 100 times as heavy off of the same roof of the same house, how long would it take to hit the ground? Then there’s the never going to happen part of the application which is used mostly for effect: If you somehow brought a bulldozer up to the roof of the house and dropped it, how long would it take for the bulldozer to hit the ground? Now you get to use your algebra and you’ll have the answer in no time.